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Hurd and Hoiighton.Pulilishers.Ne'/^^T-' 



Charles Dickens 



A SKETCH OF 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 
By f.' b; PEEKINS. 



^ 




NEW YORK : 
G. P. PUTNAM & SONS, 

ASSOCIATION BUILDING, 23d ST. 

1870. 



-^t 



i^' 






Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1870, 

By G. P. PUTNAM & SONS, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Soutljom District 
of New York. 



Stereotyped by Little, Rknnie & Co., Press of the New Yoke Printing Co., 

645 and 647 Broadway. 81-85 Centre Street. 



^?c> 



PEEFACE. 



In a literary life, there is commonly but very 
little of incident or adventure ; and if the author's 
books are in some sense equivalent to the soldier's 
battles, there is this difference, that in the latter 
case the biographer is usually telling the story of 
peril, blood, and death to an audience who were not 
present at the scene ; while in the former — at least 
in the case of a universal favorite like Dickens — in 
describing or analyzing the works of his subject, he 
would very likely be talking to people who know 
more about them than he does himself, and at any 
rate can readily check him off by a reference to the 
subject-matter. We none of us saw Waterloo, and 
Victor Hugo or Captain Siborne have us at their 
mercy while they give us such a story as they see 
fit of the terrible hollow way or the final charge of 
the British line. Everybody has " David Copper- 
field" or " Martin ChuzzlcAvit," or can have them: 



4 PREFACE. 

I have accordingly felt that the less I enlarged 
upon books in everybody's hands, the wiser I 
should be. 

I have printed a number of extracts from the re- 
views of thirty and thirty-five years ago, because 
they seemed to me to present a picture of the young 
author's first appearance and reception, interesting 
in itself, new now to most people, and suggesting 
some rather entertaining views about criticism as 
well as the subject of it. 

No attempt has been made to give an exhaustive 
or authoritative estimate of Mr. Dickens's works as a 
literary phenomenon ; but it is believed that the few 
suggestions that are offered will bear examination, 
and will in some measure serve as hints toward cor- 
rect opinions about him. 

The brief estimate by the eminent French critic, 
Taine, which has been added as a final chapter, is 
worth reading, to show what a high authority 
thinks of a great romancer, how a Frenchman 
judges an Englishman, and perhaps still more as 
revealing something of French canons of literary 
criticism. One of these implied canons has been 
repeatedly and noisily put forward of late years 
even in respectable quarters in this country, and it 
is too great an error not to be referred to here. It 
is, that art has no business to take morality or reli- 



PREFACE. 5 

gion into the account. It will be found that one of 
M. Taine's principal objections to Mr. Dickens rests 
on this proposition. A shallower falsity can hardly 
be cited. Morality and religion are true, though a 
good many Frenchmen may think otherwise, and a 
few denaturalized Yankees may fancy it smart to 
propagate at home the French moral disease which 
they contracted in Paris. The office of art is to 
represent what is true: morality and religion are 
true. To omit them from the characters or motives 
of an English novel of society would be as mon- 
strous an oversight and as fatal to the artistic excel- 
lence of the book, as to inject them into a story by 
Paul de Kock or Ernest Feydeau. The views of 
M. Taine have the further interest of contradicting 
those of the condemning clerical critics I have men- 
tioned in my text. M. Taine says that one of Dick- 
ens's worst faults was, that he put so much morality 
and religion in his books. The clergymen in ques- 
tion say that his worst fault was, that there is no 
religion, but practically an immoral influence, in his 
books. We may laugh to see our overweighted 
Ivanhoe of romance escape, while the Norman and 
the Templar of this critical tournament, charging 
from either side, nullify each other, very much 
like Front-de-Boeuf and Boisguilbert at Ashley-de- 
la-Zouch. 



6 PREFACE. 

JSTaturally, some material has been derived from 
the newspapers. Proper credit, it is believed, has 
been given. We all know that the best literary- 
talent of the time is said to tend more and more to 
utter itself in newspapers. To have drawn from 
such sources is so far a comforting assurance that 
some of this little book is good for something. 

F. B. P. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Early Life; First Works, 9 

II. Established Faaie, 61 

III. Drama; Readings, etc., 92 

IV. Private Life, Traits, and Anecdotes, . . 115 
V. Charles Dickens: by M. Henri Taine, . . 215 



Charles Dickes"s, 

HIS LIFE AKD WOEIvS. 



Charles Dickens was born in a suburb of the 
great English naval station of Portsmouth, called 
Landport, on the 7th of February, 1812, the year of 
Napoleon's fatal campaign against Russia, and of the 
beginning of the " War of 1812" between the United 
States and England. His father, Mr. John Dickens, 
was a man of intellect and education, and possessed 
a considerable share of that faculty of observing and 
delineating character which was so wonderfully de- 
veloped in his famous sqn, and which indeed became 
the most prominent litei'ary trait and most valuable 
inheritance of the latter. Mr. Dickens senior was 
employed by the Government in the pay department 
of the Navy, in sonje way that required him to re- 
side at diiferent times at Sheerness, Chatham, Plym- 
outh, Portsmouth, or other important naval stations. 
In the long wars between England and France, from 
1792 to 1815, the former power kept a gigantic navy 
in constant and active service, employing sometimes 
nine hundred ships and three or four hundred trans- 
ports, and a hundred and fifty thousand men ; and 
1* 



10 CHARLES DICKENS, 

expending nearly a liiindred million dollars a year. 
In an employment so extensive and multifarious as 
that of paying oiF the numberless and heterogene- 
ously varied individuals of this great sea-army with 
wages and prize-money — a kind of intercourse that 
comes so closely home to men's business and bosoms, 
and, like the giving of an exhilarating gas, stirs them 
into the joyful or angry exhibition of their most 
natural characters — in such a business as that, Pay- 
master Dickens could not but see an infinite series 
of pictures and traits of humanity, good and bad, 
ludicrous and affecting, simple and shrewd, con- 
temptible and noble. This he actually did, and was 
accustomed to watch them with a lively interest. 
After the peace of 1815, being dismissed from office 
with a pension, he went to London, and apparently 
from a second coincidence of character with that of 
his son, obtained employment as a reporter of the 
Parliamentary debates. All his life long he habitu- 
ally enjoyed describing the scenes and characters 
that had come before him during his official life. 

It was thus among associations congenial to his 
own disposition, that the early youth of Charles 
Dickens was passed ; and a nature so extremely and 
sensitively open as his to impressions from without, 
and so persistent and perfect in retaining and appre- 
hending them, must necessarily hav^e received much, 
both of incident and of habit, from this home expe- 
rience. 

Over and above his home training, the boy re- 
ceived notliing of what is usually termed "educa- 
'tion," except an ordinary school course, which does 



HIS LIFE AND W0KK8. 11 

not seem to have even pointed toward any regularly 
classical or professional studies. As soon as he was 
old enough he was placed as clerk in an attorney's 
office. The duties of the position were, however, 
entirely uncongenial to him. The English '^ attor- 
ney" does not correspond exactly to what we in 
America call a " lawyer." He is occupied only in 
the inferior duties of the profession, while the bar- 
rister (the more successful of whom become " Ser- 
geants," such as Messrs. Buzfuz and Snubbin) exe- 
cutes whatever requires or is supposed to require the 
nobler powers of the mind. A moment's recollec- 
tion Avill remind every reader of English romance 
that the men of details, of mere writs and copies and 
drudgery, and the rascally men of law, are attor- 
neys^ and not barristers ; such as Oily Gammon and 
his partners ; Sampson Brass, Dodson & Fogg, etc. 
In the attorney's office, therefore, is to be encoun- 
tered the greatest share of whatever is dry, tiresome, 
and unprofitable, and the greatest risk of whatever 
is petty, vulgar, dirty, and corrupt in the business 
of the law. As that business lives entirely on the 
disputes of human beings, it has a full share of 
these qualities. And of whatever is most tedious 
and unprofitable in the office drudgery, the junior 
clerk is, by virtue of his position, certain to obtain 
the fullest portion. In the city of London, the busi- 
est and most crowded mass of modern civilization, 
all the evil side of every human interest, is concen- 
trated and intensified. Of all the law offices in the 
world, therefore, that of an attorney, and a London 
attorney, was exactly the place whose occupations 



12 CHARLES DICKENS, 

must be most intolerable to a joyous, free, genial, 
and overflowingly imaginative youth, full of abound- 
ing life and activity in body and mind, loving what 
is kindly and generous and good, hating what is 
mean and dirty and bad, by natural organization 
under the necessity of devoting his whole existence 
to one single task, and held to this necessity by a 
practically insuperable inability to do well in any 
other. The boy, therefore, very quickly escaped, and 
making a long step toward his actual vocation, be- 
came a reporter. 

His legal experience, short and superficial as it 
was, w^as however by no means lost upon him. It 
is one of the magical powers of genius to receive 
much from little. Gibbon has told us how even a 
brief experience as an officer of English militia 
became a constant and considerable aid in his un- 
derstanding and description of the military history 
and battle tactics of the Roman Empire. Scott's 
similar career as a cavalry volunteer greatly vitalized 
and verified his many spirited battle-pictnres; and 
even the short office life of our dissatisfied young 
clerk has left many distinct traces in his works. His 
delineations of the persons, the office fittings, the doc- 
uments, the personal and professional manners of 
the London attorney's office and his clerks, are clear, 
life-like, full, and detailed even to a microscopic 
point as compared with those of mercantile counting- 
houses and warehouses. Observe, for a single in- 
stance, the quantity of pictorial representation about 
the offices of Dodson & Fogg, and Mr. Perker, and 
on the other hand the scarcity of the same in the 



HIS LIFE A^D WORKS. 13 

case of tlie warehouse of Murdstoiie & Grinby, or the 
counting-house of Cheeryble Brothers. In the latter 
cases all the persons necessary for the story are de- 
scribed, and sufficiently described, but with very 
little of still-life, so to speak, or accessory group- 
ing ; whereas the lawyers' offices are described with 
a gusto, an obvious fulness of apprehension, and 
even a superfluity of both personages and surround- 
ings. 

In "David Copperfield," which is understood to 
be partly represented or colored from portions of the 
writer's own experience of life, there is a curiously 
entertaining and vividly characteristic account of 
his trials in becoming a competent short-hand re- 
porter — a story which is exactly true to nature, as 
hundreds of editors and reporters can testify, who 
have undergone it all. Most characteristic, perhaps, 
is the difficulty — which probably even the most 
thoughtful a priori analyst would never foresee — of 
reading what one's own self has written. Dickens, 
however, quickly vanquished all obstacles, and be- 
came a successful newspaper workman, being the 
swiftest verbatim reporter — and besides this the best 
reporter^ which is by no means the same thing — in 
either House of Parliament. In this particular, Mr. 
Dickens was very much like the late Henry J. Ray- 
mond. ' The great intellectual powers, and particu- 
larly the entire self-command, and extreme readi- 
ness, quickness, and certitude of mental action with 
which such men superadd brain to fingers, lifts them 
far above the mere reporter-mechanic, and indeed 
prevents them from remaining reporters very long. 



14 CHARLES DICKENS, 

While they follow the speaker word for word, they 
are supervising and revising him with an intellect 
very likely every way equal, and, in truth and finish 
of expression, very likely decidedly superior to his; 
and as one or another of the invariable slips, stum- 
bles, or carelessnesses of oral delivery streams out 
of the lightning-like i3encil, the brain-reporter cures 
it, while the mechanical reporter insures it. Mr. 
Raymond accordingly made the best reports of Mr. 
Webster's speeches ; — it was because they were bet- 
ter than the speeches. Without knowing a single tra- 
dition or anecdote bearing on the point, it is neces- 
sarily obvious to any experienced newspaper man, 
that this quality, superadded to his other profes- 
sional qualities, was what gave the youthful Dickens 
his success in reporting. His work when " extended" 
was not only what the speakers had spoken, but it 
was the same made better, and, in fact, wherever 
necessary, made good. Like the work of a great por- 
trait painter, this reporter with a genius reproduced 
all the good of his subject, cured or concealed the 
defects, "telling the truth in love," and giving to 
the spectator the best of the subject blended with 
the best of the artist. 

Dickens's first engagement was on the True Sun, 
an ultra-radical newspaper, born amidst the furious 
contests which marked the era of the Reform I^ill 
of 1832 and the times preceding, in which O'Connell 
was so. prominent, and among whose clouds we can 
now begin to see, in something like historical per- 
spective, across the distance of a whole generation, 
not only the vigorous and burly figure of the great 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 1.5 

Irish patriot, but many other famous personages, 
some few still living, but most of them dead. O'Con- 
nell himself, Burdett, Brougham, the late Earl of 
Derby (the " Rupert of Debate," and garnished, 
moreover, by O'Connell with the bitter nickname 
of "Scorpion Stanley"), Sir Robert Peel, and many 
more are gone. Lord John Russell, now Earl Rus- 
sell, is almost a solitary survivor of the leading 
parliamentarians of those days of turbulence and 
peril. The True Sun was established by Patrick 
Grant, was edited after him by Daniel Whittle Har- 
vey, and then by Mr. W. J. Fox. It was rather the 
expression of partisan views so extreme and angry 
as to be only temporary in importance or interest, 
than the permanent and appropriate voice of any 
great principle or of any large constituency, and it 
accordingly lasted not many years. Among its staff 
were, besides young Dickens, his friend Laman 
Blanchard, that older workman of literature, Leigh 
Hunt, and perhaps Douglas Jerrold. 

The services of the speedy and trustworthy young 
reporter were, however, soon transferred to a stronger 
and better paper, the Morning Chronicle^ also a 
liberal, but moderately and respectably liberal sheet, 
upon which were at different times employed many 
persons well known in other fields of effort. Among 
these were James Stephen, the lawyer and political 
writer; David Ricardo, the political economist; 
William Ilazlitt, the critic ; Joseph Jekyll, the law- 
yer and wit; J. Payne Collier, the Shakspearian 
commentator ; Alexander Chalmers, the biographer ; 
and, somewhat later, Henry Mayhew, Shirley Brooks, 



16 CHARLES DICKENS, 

G. H. Lewes, and too many more to be named here. 
-At the time of Dickens's accession to its staff, his 
future father-in-law, Mr. George Hogarth, was also 
employed upon it. Mr. Hogarth, who had been a 
lawyer, or, in the local *phrase, a " writer to the 
signet," in Edinburgh, had come to London to. live 
by his talents as a musical composer and a writer, 
and was now, and for some years afterward, the 
dramatic and musical critic of the Chronicle. 

It was during the period of his employment on 
the Chronicle that young Dickens made his first real 
experiment in his real vocation. Like many another 
author, however, he had long before composed " cer- 
tain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight 
or ten, and represented with great applause to over- 
flowing nurseries." 

How many authors have remembered, and will re- 
member with amusement and sympathy, their own 
first experience of print, with its odd, poignant little 
glory of conscious achievement — like a hen's at 
hatching, or a human mother's with her first baby — 
when they read the great novelist's own description : 

" The magazine in which my first effusion — dropped 
stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and 
trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark ofiice, 
up a dark court, in Fleet-street — appeared in all the 
glory of print ; on which memorable occasion— how 
well I recollect it ! — I walked down to Westminster 
Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my 
eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they 
could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen 
there." 



HIS LIFE AND WOEKS. 17 

This sketch was "Mr. Minns and his Cousin," and 
the magazine was the Monthly 3Iagazine^ now-a- 
days often called the Old Monthly Magazine, to 
distinguish it from its comparatively rather " fast" 
young competitor, the N'eia Monthly, in those days 
just begun. The Old Monthly was really old, too, 
for a magazine, having been established in 1796, and 
being therefore now forty years old save one. 

Shortly afterward, and during the years 1836 and 
1837, the " Sketches by Boz" appeared in the even- 
ing edition of the Ghronide. Though often re- 
printed, the author's own statement of the character- 
istic fancy which selected his well-known signature 
of " Boz" is better than any other. He says that it 
was " the nickname of a pet child, a younger brother, 
whom I had dubbed Moses, in honor of the Vicar 
of Wakefield, which, being facetiously pronounced 
through the nose, became Boses, and, being shortened, 
became Boz. ' Boz' was a very familiar household 
word to me, long before I was an author, and so I 
came to adopt it." 

One authority — not the best, however — says that 
it was a little sister who first said Boses, because she 
could not pronounce it right. 

If Dickens had never written anything but the 
*' Sketches by Boz," it is not improbable that they 
would have been published in two volumes, as they 
were ; but their author would not at present be 
heard of any oftener, for instance, than the Spaniard, 
Don Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio, who was a writer 
of some standing in those days, but of whom 'jobody 
knows anything now except people who rummage 



18 CHARLES DICKENS, 

through long sets of old magazines. The " Sketches" 
were, however, at once decidedly successful in Lon- 
don, where they belonged, and at once gave their 
author a recognized standing among the belles-lettres 
writers of the city. It is easy to trace in them nearly 
all the characteristics afterward more strongly de- 
veloped in the novels — the overflowing fun and 
humor, and sense of the ridiculous and absurd ; the 
almost preternatural sensibility to points, shades, 
and peculiarities of character, utterance, appearance, 
and manners ; the ease and full abundance of per- 
sonation ; the astounding quantity of grotesque 
names and surnames ; the kindliness and sympathy, 
just as ready and just as abundant as the laughter ; 
the entire originality, often verging toward carica- 
ture, of the methods of conceiving the thoughts, and 
of the forms of expressing them; in short, the super- 
abounding and almost riotous wealth of material, 
the unconscious ease and certainty of management, 
and the hearty, joyful geniality which bathes the 
whole. The first series of the " Sketches" was pub- 
lished in two volumes, and was embellished — really 
embellished — with illustrations by George Cruik- 
shank — as great a genius in his art as Dickens in 
his; and whose modes of expressing thought pic- 
torially might have been created on purpose for an 
alliance with the new author, so congenial were they 
in their healthy mirth, sharp, good-natured satire, 
and wonderful keenness and closeness of characteri- 
zation. The practical good sense, or the good 
fortune, which suggested this immediate union of 
2^en and graver, aided greatly in the success of the 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 19 

*' Sketches," and still more so in that of the romances 
that followed. Indeed, it might almost be assumed 
that a novel of the men and manners of to-day must 
be illustrated, and by able hands too, in order to 
have anything like a full success. The great mass 
of readers have none too much power of pictorial 
imagination ; what they are to receive with pleasure 
must be so presented as not to require any effort of 
thought; and competent pictures afford them ex- 
actly the centres of crystallization, so to speak, which 
they need. 

While the " Sketches" were still appearing in the 
Chronicle^ or in the Monthly^ or both, it happened 
that there was in London a firm of stationers and 
booksellers, in a small way, by name Messrs. Chap- 
man & Hall. One day a lady, but evidently in 
necessitous circumstances, entered their shop, and 
desired Mr. Hall to buy certain designs which she 
showed him. They were by her husband, she said, 
Mr. Seymour, the artist; she was Mrs. Seymour; 
they were in need ; and she had been trying to sell 
these designs, at one place and another, for a few 
shillings. After some conversation, Mr. Hall paid 
her some small price for them, and she went away. 

When Mr. Chapman came in, Mr. Hall told him 
about the purchase ; and the partners proceeded to 
consider what they could do with their designs, since 
they had bought them. They were all, or nearly all, 
drawings of a sort for which there was in those days 
a good deal of demand — namely, illustrations of the 
absurdities and mishaps of Cockneys in search of 
sport, science, adventures, or the picturesque; and 



20 CHARLES DICKENS, 

had been executed by the artist — a man of undoubted 
ability, but not more gifted than other people with 
the faculty of getting on in the world — on specula- 
tion, for whomsoever would buy. The first conclusion 
reached was, to procure some text of some kind to 
be " written up" to the pictures, to be of an amusing 
character, and to be issued in shilling numbers. The 
next question was, Who shall write this text ? and, 
on still further consultation, it was decided that the 
best hand would be the young man, whoever he 
was — it seems to have been taken for granted that 
he was young — who was writing the " Sketches by 
Boz," which were amusing people so much. It is 
not unlikely that the firm also remembered a comic 
opera about that time produced, called '* The Village 
Coquettes," whose text was also by the same Boz, 
and which was fairly successful. 

Mr. Dickens has himself recorded the account of 
the negotiation which ensued, and which resulted in 
the composition of the "Pickwick Papers." He 
tells of the pleasant surprise with which he beheld 
in the visitor a countenance of good augury. " When 
I opened my door in Furnival's Inn to the managing 
partner who represented the firm, I recognized in 
him the person from whose hands I had bought, two 
or three years previously, and whom I had never 
seen before or since, my first copy of the magazine 
in which my first efi'usion . . . appeared in all 
the glory of print. . . . I told my visitor of the 
coincidence, which we both hailed as a good omen; 
and so fell to business." The proposed " shilling 
numbers" appear to have been a conception of the 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 21 

business man ; for Mr. Dickens says, they were then 
*' only known to rae, or, I believe, to anybody else, by 
a dim recollection of certain interminable novels in 
that form, which used to be carried about the country 
by peddlers, and over some of which I remember to 
have shed innumerable tears, before I had served my 
apprenticeship to Life." These " interminable nov- 
els" were doubtless " The Romance of the Forest," 
" The Scottish Chiefs," and other works of the same 
kind; for, in the days when Dickens was young 
enough to cry over such books, they and their like 
used to be sold and delivered serially, in separate 
numbers,' about the country by the " peddlers," or 
chapmen — personages much like what are in this 
country at present sufficiently notorious by the more 
stately designation of "subscription book-agents." 
Indeed, the same sort of business is carried on in 
England still, although the books now sold in the 
serial form are, perhaps, a grade higher in literary 
merit than they were fifty years ago. 

The further conclusion reached, and the sequel, is 
thus described by Mr. Dickens himself: 

" The idea propounded to me was, that the 
monthly something should be a vehicle for certain 
plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour; and there 
WLiS a notion, either on the part of that admirable 
humorous artist or of my visitor (I forget which), 
that a ' Nimrod Club,' the members of which were 
to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting 
themselves into difficulties through their want of 
dexterity, would be the best means of introducing 
these. I objected, on consideration that although 



22 CHARLES DICKENS, 

born and partly bred in the country, I was no great 
sportsman, except in regard of all kinds of locomo- 
tion ; that the idea was not novel, and had been 
already much used ; that it would be infinitely bet- 
ter for the plates to arise naturally out of the text ; 
and that I should like to take my own way, with a 
freer range of English scenes and people, and was 
afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, what- 
ever course I might prescribe to myself at starting. 
My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pick- 
wick, and wrote the first number; from the proof- 
sheets of which, Mr. Seymour made his drawing of 
the Club, and that happy portrait of the founder by 
which he is always recognized, and which may be 
said to have made him a reality. I connected Mr. 
Pickwick with a club, because of the orio-iDal suo;- 
gestion, and I put in Mr. Winkle expressly for the 
use of Mr. Seymour. We started with a number of 
twenty-four pages instead of thirty-two, and four 
illustrations in lieu of a couple. Mr. Seymour's sud- 
den and lamented death, before the second numbei 
was published, brought about a quick decision upon 
a point already in agitation ; the number became 
one of thirty-two pages, with two illustrations, and 
remained so to the end. My friends told me it was 
a low, cheap form of publication, by which I should 
ruin all my rising hopes ; and how right my friends 
turned out to be, everybody now knows." 

No apology is necessary for the -repetition or par- 
ticularity used in this mode of recording the process 
of production of so significant a work as " The Pick- 
wick Papers." The facts are important and interest- 



HIS IJFE AND WORKS. 23 

ing, and there has been more or less of confusion, or 
at least indistinctness, about them; but the present 
order of occurrence is either given in the words of 
Mr. Dickens himself, or is accurately the substance 
of the narrative of those personally cognizant of the 
facts. First came the preparation of certain designs 
by Mr. Seymour, to be sold as should be practicable ; 
his wife, after hawking them about for a time, sells 
them to Chapman & Hall ; the firm ask Mr. Dickens 
to write a text to them ; he agrees, not precisely to 
this, but to write a text, for which Mr. Seymour is 
to prepare plates ; he writes accordingly, and Mr. 
Seymour at first, and afterward Mr. Hablot K. 
Browne, illustrate the book. Apparently the only 
one of the original set of designs sold by Mrs. Sey- 
mour which was actually used in the book was that 
of Mr. Alfred Jingle's intelligent dog Ponto perusing 
the notice, " Gamekeeper has orders to shoot all dogs 
found in this enclosure," and declining to enter, while 
his admiring master, with flint-lock fowling-piece on 
his shoulder, stares back at him from within the paling. 
Abundance of comic pictures of this general char- 
acter are to be found in the light literature of Lon- 
don of those days, and some of them are from time 
to time sold at the book auctions in New York. 

The first number of " The Pickwick Papers," with 
its memorable picture of Mr. Pickwick addressing 
the Club, appeared March 1st, 1836. The success 
of the work was so instant and immense, as at once 
to mark the power and fix the fame of their youth- 
ful author — for he was now only twenty-four years 
old. His reputation was made as suddenly, based as 



24 CHARLES DICKENS, 

firmly, maintained as high and as long, as those of 
Scott or Byron. He was at once recognized as a 
genius of the first rank, and as the series of his 
works lengthened, they confirmed this reputation 
until it is no more to be questioned than those of 
the two great writers just named. 

It is interesting and instructive to look back to the 
old magazines of those times, and compare the 
utterances of the various supposed organs, or rather 
directors, of literary opinion — for the critics of thirty 
years ago were much more lordly and lofty in their 
deliverances than now. Moreover, this very aid of 
superiority has become funny by age, if we only 
stop to consider the relative weight to-day of these 
nameless scribblers or their yellow, old " back num- 
bers," and of the modern English classic whom they 
dealt with so patronizingly or so cavalierly. And 
still further, the agreeable jostling and even interne- 
cine contradictoriness of their various verdicts is a 
profitable spectacle — for they sometimes vetoed or 
denied or reversed or dissolved or annihilated — 
whatever the correct technic may be — the judgments 
of their contemporaries, like so many New York 
Judges nullifying each othei's' motions in an im- 
portant railroad case. However, the voice of the 
people settled the matter with small heed to the 
gentlemen of the quill. "Pickwick" became a 
*'rage." Everybody bought it, read it, laughed at 
it, cried over it, thought it, talked it. It permeated 
and tinged the whole reading mind of England with 
a penetrating and positive power, like the magic of a 
strong chemical reagent; in six months a whole new 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 25 

chapter was opened in English literature. Though 
often copied, there is a graphic passage from the 
Quarterly Jxeview of October, 1837, which must be 
quoted here ; for the sake both of the facts it gives 
and the good sense with which it interprets them. 
The reviewer says : 

*'The popularity of this writer is one of the most 
remarkable literary phenomena of recent times, for 
it has been fairly earned without resorting to any 
of the means by which most other writers have suc- 
ceeded in attracting the attention of their contem- 
poraries. He has flattered no popular j^rejudice, 
and profited by no passing folly ; he has attempted 
no caricature sketches of the manners or conversa- 
tion of the aristocracy ; and there are very few 
political or personal allusions in his works. More- 
over, his class of subjects are such as to expose him 
at the outset to the fatal objection of vulgarity ; and 
with the exception of occasional extracts in the 
newspapers, he received little or no assistance from 
the press. Yet, in less than six months from the 
appearance of the first number of the * Pickwick Pa- 
pers,' the whole reading public were talking about 
them ; the names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Snod- 
grass, Dodson & Pogg, had become familiar in our 
mouths as household words, and Mr. Dickens was 
the grand object of interest to the wdiole tribe of 
'Leo Hunters,' male and female, of the metropolis. 
Nay, Pickwick chintzes figured in linen-drapers' win- 
dows, aud Weller corduroys in breeches-makers' 
advertisements ; Boz cabs might be seen rattling- 
through the streets, and the portrait of the author 
2 



26 CHARLES DICKENS, 

of 'Pelhara,' or ' Crichton,' was scraped down or 
pasted over, to make room for that of the new popu- 
lar favorite, in the omnibuses. This is only to be 
accounted for on the supposition that a fresh vein of 
humor had been opened ; that a new and decidedly 
original genius had sprung up." 

The Eclectic Revievy for March, 1837, testifies un- 
consciously to the perfect originality of the new phe- 
nomenon, by the innocent perplexity of almost its 
first words. After complimenting the " Sketches," 
and saying that "tlie present work will certainly 
not diminish in reputation — we are much mistaken 
if it do not add to it," it says, comically enough, 
"It would be somewhat difficult to determine that 
precise species of the very extensive genus of ficti- 
tious publications to which The Posthumous Papers of 
the Pickwick Club ought to be referred. " Naturally, 
if the ornithologist discovers a new bird specifically 
difi*erent from any old bird, he will find it hard to 
assign it to a genus, until he makes the necessary 
new one for it. Pickwick would not range with any 
known species, because it was an unknown species, 
not yet classified. This writer goes wandering on 
in a good-naturedj helpless way, but still entirely and 
amusingly at sea about his genera, and about as 
much at home as a hen with a brood of young ducks. 
He complains that there is no plot, or if there is, 
that it is not adhered to ; he says he " presumes" it 
must be considered a work of fiction, " notwithstand- 
ing the gravity with which the title-page assures us 
that it is a faithful record ;" and he gets through 
with his task by means of a kind of subdued enu- 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 27 

meration, as if he was afraid of the creature, of such 
good and bad qualities as he can perceive. He has 
seized upon the great central quality of all — the 
transcendent power and truth of Dickens in seeing 
and reproducing individualities. "His personages- 
impress us with all the force and vividness of reality. 
They are not described — they are exhibited," he 
says. Sundry extracts are added, which are judi- 
ciously selected ; and to conclude, there is a grave 
admonition — though a very cautious one — more tim- 
idly phrased than ever, about the " few instances of 
profanity," and the " making sport of fanaticism and 
hypocrisy," which the reviewer terms a "dangerous 
task," and intimates, very gingerly indeed, that it 
had better be let alone. The EcUctic was a Dissent- 
ing magazine, and it was natural enough that it 
should dislike the pictures of Mr. Stiggins and his 
brethren and sisters of the Brick Lane Branch ; but 
the reviewer had to be very careful not to put his 
head into that cap. 

Blackwood'' s Magazine maintained a perfect si- 
lence about the new novelist for a number of years. 
This was no doubt in consequence of the decidedly 
Liberal politics of Mr. Dickens, and the still more 
decided Toryism of the great Scotch periodical, 
which was always unscrupulously injected into all 
its dealings with literature, without much regard to 
truth, justice, or decency. However, it was a matter 
of no consequence, and when, at last, it spoke, it is 
really of no consequence what it said. An opinion 
delayed from such motives, and at last expressed 
from such motives, must necessarily be worthless in 



28 CHARLES DICKENS, 

itself. The mere fact of any expression of it becomes 
the strongest testimony at once to the importance 
of the subject, and the foolishness of the critic. 

Not much attention was paid by the critics to the 
"Sketches" until the appearance of "Pickwick," 
when they were frequently noticed together, some- 
times with the addition of " Oliver Twist," as in the 
case of the Westminster Review^ which, in July, 
1837, devoted an article to the new literary luminary. 
By this time Mr. Bentley, the publisher, sharply on 
the watch for whatever might promote the prosperity 
of his Miscellcmy^ then just projected, had offered 
Mr. Dickens its editorship, which he had accepted. 
The first number of it appeared January 1st, 1837, 
and in its second number had been commenced 
" Oliver Twist." 

The first paragraph of the 'Westminster Hevieio 
does justice to the intrinsic merits of the author. 
The modesty which had decided him to use an 
incognito at his first appearance had been deservedly 
rewarded by the overpowering success, not of a 
name, of a prestige, or of an influence — for no new 
author could have been more utterly destitute of 
these helps — but of the most genuine excellence, 
and of excellence most genuinely alone. And this 
triumph was all the greater in a society so bathed, 
soaked, ingrained with social prejudice and pride of 
rank, with regard for influence, and distrust of new- 
comers, and where even yet literary lords and ladies 
found that their titles on their title-pages visibly 
enhanced the mercantile value of their books. 

It is true, however, that, as in other cases of such 



HIS LIFE AND WOEKS. 29 

anonymous risks, the mystery which, in case of fail- 
ure, would simply have made the obscurity of the 
disappearing aspirant darker and more silent, made 
the celebrity of his success noisier and brighter. 
All exclaimed, What a great romancer ! as loudly 
as if they had known who it was ; and all exclaimed, 
too, Who is this great romancer ? so that the excite- 
ment was at least doubled, curiosity and wonder 
being superadded to admiration and enjoyment. 
Who is Boz ? everybody asked ; and when the 
readily-yielded secret was known, the first discov- 
erers hastened to make what jokes they could of it 
by saying. Who the Dickens is Boz? and another 
versified the trifling pun into a quatrain ; 

Who the Dickens " Boz" could be, 

Puzzled many a learned elf; 
But time unveiled the mystery, 

And " Boz" appeared as Dickens' self. 

The Westminster Jieview begins thus: 
" Our readers will not, we imagine, be surprised 
at finding that the general popularity of the 'Pick- 
wick Papers' induces us to enter on a criticism of 
their author, more serious than is generally accorded 
to the anonymous writers of productions given to the 
world in so very fugitive a form as that in which the 
whole of them have appeared. That popularity is so 
extensive, that it would be impossible to give an 
accurate idea either of the most remarkable writers 
of the day, or of the taste of the reading public of 
this country, without noticing works which have 
perhaps elicited more general and warmer admiration 



30 CHARLES DICKENS, 

than any works of fiction which have been published 
for several years past. It must be observed, too, 
that this great reputation has been acquired without 
the aid of any interest excited by the personal 
notoriety of the author." 

Equally friendly and just is the following conclu- 
sion, at the close of the discussion : 

" The great and extensive popularity of Boz is the 
result, not of popular caprice, or of popular bad 
taste, but of great intrinsic powers of mind, from 
which we augur considerable future excellence," etc. 

The Spectator said, very aj^tly putting a number 
of shrewd points : 

"The secret of this extraordinary success is, that 
he exactly hits the level of the capacity and taste 
of the mass of readers. He furnishes, too, that 
commodity which mankind in all ages and countries 
most eagerly seek for and readily appreciate — amuse- 
ment. He skims lightly over the surface of men 
and manners, and takes rapid glances at life in city 
and suburb, indicating the most striking and obvious 
characteristics with a ready and spirited pencil, giv- 
ing a few strokes of comic humor and satire, and a 
touch of the pathetic, with equal effect, and intro- 
ducing episodical incidents and tales to add life and 
interest to the picture. Boz is the Cruiksliank of 
writers." 

Framr''s Magazine for April, 1840, began an arti- 
cle on " Dickens and his Works" thus : 

"Few writers have risen so rapidly into extensive 
popularity as Dickens, and that by no mean or un- 
justifiable pandering to public favor, or the use of 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 31 

low arts of trickery, puffery, or pretence. Four 
years ago his name was almost unknown, except in 
some narrow newspaper circles, and his compositions 
had not extended beyond ephemeral sketches and 
essays, which, though shrewd, clever, and amusing, 
would never have been collected, as they now are, 
into volumes, but for the speedily-acquired and far- 
diffused fame of * Pickwick.' " [This is an error, for 
at least one series of the " Sketches" had been issued 
in two volumes before " Pickwick" was suggested.] 
*' Before we pass from these ' Sketches,' we must say 
that they contain germs of almost every character 
Boz has since depicted, as well as of his incidents 
and stories, and that they display the quaint pecu- 
liarities of his style. Some of them, indeed, are, we 
think, better than anything which he has written in 
his more celebrated performances." 

The Edinburgh lievieic, a liberal publication — at 
least as able and influential a periodical as its Tory 
townfellow and adversary, Blackwood, and certainly 
more respectable in manners and morals, and a more 
trustworthy literary tribunal— in its issue for October, 
1838, put forth a somewhat elaborate estimate of 
Mr. Dickens, from which are extracted the following 
passages, which refer to the author's first four works 
collectively, and which judge him from them: 

"He has put them" (viz., " Sketches," " Pickwick," 
"Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist") "forth in a 
form attractive, it is true, to that vast majority, the 
idle readers, but not one indicative of high literary 
pretension, or calculated to inspire a belief of prob- 
able permanence of reputation. They seem, at first 



32 CHARLES DICKENS, 

sight, to be among the most evanescent of the liter- 
ary ephemerm of their day — mere humorous speci- 
mens of the lightest kind of light reading, expressly 
calculated to be much sought and soon forgotten ; 
fit companions for the portfolio of caricatures ; good 
nonsense ; and nothing more. This is the view which 
many persons will take of Mr. Dickens's writings; 
but this is not our deliberate view of them. We 
think him a very original writer — well entitled to 
his popularity, and not likely to lose it — and the 
truest and most spirited delineator of English life, 
amongst the middle and lower classes, since the days 
of Smollett and Fielding. He has remarkable pow- 
ers of observation, and great skill in communicating 
what he has observed ; a keen sense of the ludicrous ; 
exuberant humor; and that mastery in the pathetic 
which, though it seems opposed to the gift of humor, 
is often found in conjunction with it. Add to these 
qualities an unaffected style, fluent, easy, spirited, 
and terse, a good deal of dramatic power, and great 
truthfulness and ability in description. We know 
no other English writer to whom he bears a 
marked resemblance. He sometimes imitates other 
writers, such as Fielding, in his introductions, and 
Washington Irving, in his detached tales; and 
this exhibits his skill as a parodist. But his own 
manner is very distinct, and comparison with any 
other would not serve to illustrate and describe it. 
We would compare him rather with the painter 
Hogarth. . . . Like Hogarth, he takes a keen and 
practical view of life — is an able satirist — very suc- 
cessful in depicting the ludicrous side of human 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 33 

nature, and rendering its follies more apparent by 
humorous exaggeration —peculiarly skilful in its 

management of details It is fair, in making 

this comparison, to add, that it does not hold good 
throughout, and that Mr. Dickens is exempt from 
two of Hogarth's least agreeable qualities — his cyn- 
icism and his coarseness. There is no misanthropy 
in his satire, and no coarseness in his descriptions — 
a merit enhanced by the nature of his subjects. His 
works are chiefly pictures of humble life — frequently 
of the humblest. The reader is led through scenes 
of poverty and crime, and all the characters are 
made to discourse in the appropriate language of 
their respective classes; and yet we recollect no 
passage which ought to cause pain to the most sen- 
sitive delicacy, if read aloud in female society. 

*' We have said that his satire was not misan- 
thropic. This is eminently true. One of the quali- 
ties we the most admire in him is his comprehensive 
spirit of humanity, the tendency of his writings to 
make us practically benevolent — to excite our sym- 
pathy in behalf of the aggrieved and suffering in all 
classes, and especially to those who are most removed 
from observation. He especially directs our attention 
to the helpless victims of untoward circumstances, 
or a vicious system — to the imprisoned debtor — the 
orphan pauper — the parish apprentice — the juvenile 
criminal — and to the tyranny which, under the 
combination of parental neglect with the mercenary 
brutality of a pedagogue, may be exercised with 
impunity in schools. His humanity is plain, practical, 
and manly. It is quite untainted with sentimentality. 
2* 



34 CHARLES DICKENS, 

There is no mawkish wailing for ideal distresses — no 
morbid exaggeration of the evils incident to our 
lot — no disposition to excite unavailing discontent, 
or to turn our attention from remediable grievances 
to those w^hich do not admit a remedy. Though he 
appeals much to our feelings, w^e can detect no in- 
stance in Avhich lie has employed the verbiage of 
spurious philanthropy. 

" He is equally exempt from the meretricious 
cant of spurious philosophy. He never endeavors 
to mislead our sympathies — to pervert plain notions 
of right and wrong — to make vice interesting in our 
eyes, and shake our confidence in those whose con- 
duct is irreproachable, by dwelling on the hollowness 
of seeming virtue. His vicious characters are just 
what experience shows the average to be, and what 
the natural operation of those circumstances to which 
they have been exposed would lead us to expect. . . . 

" Good feeling and sound sense are shown in his 
application of ridicule. It is never levelled at poverty 
or misfortune; or at circumstances which can be 
rendered ludicrous only by their deviation from 
artificial forms ; or by regarding them through the 
medium of a conventional standard." .... 

These extracts are none too numerous nor too 
full for illustrating the force of the impression which 
Dickens made upon his time, nor for showing what 
manner of impression it was. 

A small addition, moreover, is necessary, to show 
something of the other side, and also for the not 
uninteresting purpose of aflTording means for a judg- 
ment upon criticism itself. Thus far the sum of the 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 35 

opinions has been, with small reservations, flivorable. 
It was favorable, however, "the day after the fair." 
The critical band did not discover anything; it was 
the reading public who discovered. The popularity 
of the " Sketches" was hardly recognized at all by 
the high and mighty gentlemen of the magazines. 
But when the "Sketches" had been prosperous in 
an evening newspaper, tlien in a morning newspaper, 
then in a magazine, and then in a book ; when thirty 
thousand copies of " Pickwick" had been sold ; when 
not one, but several, dramatized versions of it had 
been put on the London stage, and the new writer 
had actually instilled a new color into actual English 
life — after all that, it was no very surprising dis- 
cernment which stimulated one reviewer and another 
reviewer to earn a few guineas by returning to the 
public, through a magazine article, the opinions 
which the public had already formed and given to 
the writer. The fact is, however, that it is this very 
quality— their mere reflection of public opinion, 
their very lack of any intrinsic utterance of their 
own— which makes these articles available now 
more than a whole generation after their first ap- 
pearance, as a means of explaining the nature of the 
advent which occasioned them. Except the invidious 
silence of Blackioood, little or nothing is visible of 
any outside motive in this collection of verdicts. 

There were some varieties of opinion, of course. 
Some of these are both instructive and amusing; 
for they both illustrate the important doctrine of the 
differences of taste, and show, in a sufficiently enter- 
taining way, how unsafe it is to pin one's faith upon 



36 CHAKLES DICKENS, 

the utterances of a reviewer. The Reverend Mr. 
Wilbur has recorded his sensations upon perusing 
the review, in a certain periodical, of a sermon which 
the w^orthy clergyman had prepared with much 
labor, and published with some pardonable confi- 
dence. The review was an unfavorable one; but 
such was the weighty gravity and old experience in 
its tone, that the mortified parson judged it to have 
been written by a sage of not less than three hundred 
years old. It turned out, however, that the writer 
w^as in fact a student in college, who had thus re- 
venged himself upon Mr. Wilbur for correcting a cer- 
tain false quantity in the boy's examination in Latin. 
There is no trace of any such personal enmity 
among the reviews of Dickens's works, either now 
or at any other period ; for it is not merely his good 
fortune, but his merit, to have lived almost or alto- 
gether without any properly literary enemies. 

The effort to classify the new phenomenon has 
been already mentioned. Some thought he was 
most like Fielding; some like Irving; and some, 
with a wider generalization, conceded him at once 
a place of his own among the masters, and sought 
to describe him by analogies with other departments 
of creative genius — calling him a Cruikshank, a Ho- 
garth, a Teniers. In one instance, an effort was 
made to prove him an actual plagiarist. The Quar- 
terlij Itevlew for October, 1837, devotes a number 
of ])ages to the laudable purpose of convicting Mr. 
Dickens of having substantially copied his descrip- 
tion of Mr. Weller, senior, from Irving's delineation 
of the En owlish staoe-coachman in the "Sketch Book." 



HIS IJFE AND WORKS. 37 

The pineal gland of this similarity is a single sen- 
tence. In Irving it is this: 

" He has commonly a broad full fjxce, curiously 
mottled with red, as if the blood had been forced, by 
hard feeding, into every vessel of the skin." 

In Dickens it is this : 

" and his eomplexion exhibited that pecu- 
liarly mottled combination of colors which is only to 
be seen in gentlemen of his profession, and under- 
done roast beef." 

It is probable that if Mr. Dickens had omitted the 
word " mottled," the Quarterly would not have ital- 
icized those two sentences for identity. And to so 
italicize them and condemn him, because, being a very 
accurate observer, he applied to a mottled surface 
the only proper word to describe it, after another 
very accurate observer had done the same, is hyper- 
critical. It would never have been done if each had 
said that the face in question was red. It may, 
however, be granted that Mr. Dickens admired 
Irving, and it is perfectly safe to admit further that 
he may have read Irving's description not long be- 
fore writing his own; and still further, that Mr. 
Irving's description did in fact give even tone and 
color to Mr. Dickens's description. But all this will 
not establish any charge of plagiarism, on any just 
principle of criticism nor of evidence, nor on any 
principle at all, except the undeniable one that he is 
to be found guilty who cannot prove himself inno- 
cent. Such charges have often been made ; and 
other cases where, as in this case, there was certainly 
a coincidence and probably an unconscious reproduc- 



38 CHARLES DICKENS, 

tion, have often been given as cases of actual literary 
dishonesty. But charity in judging and presump 
tions in favor of good character and intentions, nofc 
against them, are exactly as indispensable for justice 
in literary criticism as they are in a court of law, or 
in the Christian religion. The question has a suffi- 
ciently broad interest to justify the citation of one 
parallel case where the coincidence is far more strik- 
ing, because the reproduction is so much more nearly 
word for word, and so identical in thought and form, 
but where nobody ever thought of charging the 
dishonesty of purpose which constitutes plagiarism, 
and nobody ever will. Poe, in his "Raven," wrote : 

" Ai.d the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain 
T) rilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before." 

]^[rs. Browning, in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," 
wrcte : 

" W «th a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple cmiain 
Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows." 

Here, instead of one single epithet almost as una- 
voidable under the circumstances as if two different 
persons had separately described four to be the 
result of adding two and two, we have identical, 
1, metre ; 2, rhythm ; 3, rhyme; 4, choice of thing 
described (for the curtain was not necessary) ; 
5, choice of the same two epithets, one of color and 
the other of metaphorical quality. And in spite of 
all this concentrated, cumulative, and indeed irre- 
sistible evidence, the proof, if honestly estimated, 
simply shows remmisce7ice ; not plagiarism. And 
in the case of Dickens and Irving, even the reminis- 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 39 

cence is less distinct, as any one will see who will 
take the trouble to read the context of the two pas- 
sages concerned. The truth is, lastly, that most of 
the charges of plagiarism which have often been 
made, with supposed proof in specified sentences, 
are resolvable into either accidental coincidence or 
unintentional reminiscence. The same is true of co- 
incident musical strains and phrases ; and if the 
fundamental bass of a composition were to be recog- 
nized as its radical thought, somewhat as critics 
have sometimes made abstraction of the differentia 
of two passages in order to get at their real fabric 
or foundation, the number of original musical com- 
positions would not be very great; hundreds and 
thousands of them, indeed, would come down to this 
one succession : the first of the key, the fourth, 
the fifth, a dominant seventh, and the tonic again. 
But both artists and authors, like people in general, 
are a good deal better than some people think. And 
the critics as a body will never be numbered col- 
lectively, d priori, on the optimist side. 

Besides this actual imputation of wrong-doing, 
there were of course such merely depreciatory ex- 
pressions of opinion as resulted from variations of 
taste or belief The chief of these were such as 
came from the organs of the Dissenting religious 
body. Throughout the whole range of his works, 
and in the earlier ones quite as distinctly as in tlie 
later, Mr. Dickens has discharged the sharpest of 
his satire upon unworthy ministers of the gospel. In 
this discrimination he is perfectly right ; since in 
proportion as a profession is more sacred, its abuse 



40 CHARLES DICKENS, 

is more deserving of exposure and piiniishraent. But 
the exponents of clerical vices and pretences in his 
books have usually been of denominations other 
than the Church of England. This was natural, for 
it is undeniable that a coarse and vulgar impostor or 
pretender in the guise of a minister of the gospel 
was more likely, and perhaps may still be so, to be 
outside the Established Church than in it. The Dis- 
sentinor mao^azines — as in the case of the Eclectic 
quoted above — were thus the likeliest to object to 
such characters as Stiggins, and to the whole range 
of Dickens's pretenders to religion, and they did so 
accordingly. The Eclectic^ in the passage already 
quoted, cautiously admonished the novelist by inti- 
mating rather indirectly that he was not competent 
to deal with holy things, and that in order to be safe 
from irreverence and perhaps sacrilege, he would do 
well to avoid all sacred topics and personages. And 
it is very unlikely that the Eclectic would have found 
any such fault if the person satirized, instead of an 
ignorant sectarist, had been some perpetrator of a 
simony, or the pompous and corpulent holder of five 
or six fat benefices. The JSForth British Review^ 
also a Dissenting organ, re-enforces the opposition, 
but on a diflJerent line of attack. It has nothing to 
say about any danger of irreverent dealings with 
what is holy, but it charges him with vulgarity, the 
absence of real religious principle, and of real moral 
principle too, mere kind and good impulses being, it 
is asserted, the only substitutes used for them. As 
a North Briton should do (though it be praising a 
Cavalier at the expense of the Puritans), the Review 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 41 

instances Scott as a bright contrast to Dickens in 
these particulars. The paragraphs in question are 
these : 

" The mention of the Waverley Novels, and their 
broad Scottish dialect, leads unavoidably to the re- 
mark that, unlike the author of these matchless 
productions, Mr. Dickens makes his low characters 
almost always vulgar. . . . 

" In the next place, the good characters of Mr. 
Dickens's novels do not seem to have a wholesome 
moral tendency. The reason is, that many of them 
— all the author's favorites — exhibit an excellence 
flowing from constitution and temperament, and not 
from the influence of moral or religious motive. 
They act from impulse, not from principle. They 
present no struggle of contending passions ; they 
are instinctively incapable of evil ; they are, there- 
fore, not constituted like other human beings, and 
do not feel the force of temptation as it assails our 
less perfect hearts. It is this that makes them 
unreal — 

* Faultless monsters that the \rorld ne'er saw !' 

This is the true meaning of ' the simple heart' which 
Mr. Dickens so perpetually eulogizes. Indeed, they 
often degenerate into simpletons, sometimes into 
mere idiots. . . . Another error is the undue promi- 
nence given to good temper and kindness, which are 
constantly made substitutes for all other virtues, 
and an atonement for the want of them ; while a 
defect in these good qualities is the signal for instant 
condemnation and the charge of hypocrisy. It is 



42 CHAELES DICKENS, 

iiiifortunate, also, that Mr. Dickens so frequently 
represents persons with pretensions to virtue and 
piety as mere rogues and hypocrites, and never de- 
picts any whose station as clergymen, or reputation 
for piety, is consistently adorned and verified. . . . 
We cannot but sometimes contrast the tone of Mr. 
Dickens's purely sentimental passages with that of 
Sir Walter Scott on similar occasions, and the stilted 
pomp with which the former often parades a flaunt- 
in g: rase of threadbare moralitv, with the quiet and 
graceful ease with which the latter points out and 
enforces a useful lesson." 

If it be the question whether Sir Walter Scott be 
an ideal standard of ethical instruction, ten times 
as many pious Scotchmen will be found on record 
against him as for him. If this criterion of moral 
teachings be applied to novels, what will follow? 
They must represent, according to it, good charac- 
ters ; and those characters must be orthodox in their 
goodness ; in a word, such as would, on examination, 
be accepted into the membership of [my] church. 
With the odiwin theologicuni thus crossed upon the 
odium criticwm, the race of reviewers would become 
a band of indescribable miscreants. Mr. Lowell has, 
with a most bitter sarcasm, represented the critic as 
a peculiarly ofiensive kind of bug. The improved 
breed, however, would combine the mere malodorous 
disgustfulness of the noxious insect with the venom 
of a cobra di capello, and the reckless wrath of a, 
hornet. Inquisitors would be mere wet-nurses in 
comparison to such devilish beings. 

All such discussions as these of the Eclectic and 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 43 

Kortli British are entirely beside the mark. They 
do not touch the real question. That question is 
tliis: Are there such people as the novelist draws? 
and has he drawn them well? Both these ques- 
tions have been answered in the affirmative by the 
civilized world for thirty years, so far as Mr. Dickens 
is concerned. It is not the office of a novel to teach 
orthodox denominational views, nor even to diffuse 
true religion, any more than it is the office of a 
pocket-handkerchief. Handkerchiefs with the Thir- 
ty-nine Articles printed on each, or with the Shorter 
Catechism run serially through each dozen, might 
perhaps be sold ; yet the diffusion of such symbols 
in such goods is not the business, and would not 
have built the fortune, of Mr. A. T. Stewart. 

It is not necessary, how^ever, to argue the question 
here in full, interesting as it is. It is part of the 
present plan, however, to do briefly something that 
will serve quite as well as a refutation in form, both 
to set Mr. Dickens right and to show what is the 
real significance of a body of ex cathedra criticism. 
This something is, to present one or two instances, 
out of many that might be given, of mutual extinc- 
tion among the critics ; who in various points may 
fairly enough be taken to nullify each other, no 
matter how brilliant they were singly ; as, accord- 
ing to opticians, two equal beams of perfect sunlight 
may be, as it were, fired into each other, so as to ex- 
tinguish each other and produce a darkness. 

Mr. Dickens's faults, says the North British^ are 
vulgarity, unnaturalness in his personages, and a 
non-morality that amounts substantially to im- 



44 CHARLES DICKENS, 

morality. Among Mr. Dickens's characteristic vir- 
tues, says the Westminster^ are great closeness to 
nature, and absence of coarseness. And, adds the 
Edinburgh^ besides that there is no passage whicli 
should cause pain to the most sensitive female deli- 
cacy, one of the qualities we most admire in him is 
(surely not an immoral one, at least, if there is any 
truth in the New Testament) his comprehensive 
spirit of humanity, his tendency to make us practi- 
cally benevolent. 

Again (on the point of mere artistic truth and 
skill, and leaving out the questions of minor or 
major morals) : Mr. Jingle, says the Westminster, is 
absurd and impossible {because we never saw him !); 
and Mr. Pott is the best character in the book. Mr. 
Jingle, says Fraser, is the best preserved character 
in the book. Dr. Slammer, too, he adds, and other 
incidental characters, are probable (because, again, 
we have seen such people!); but the '* standing 
characters" — that is, of course, most of all, Mr. 
Pickwick and Sam Weller — are absurd. The two 
Wellers, in particular, says the Westminster, are 
admirable representatives of classes. And, observes 
I the ^Edinburgh, "There are many characters truly 
excellent. First stand Pickwick and his man 
Weller." 

Even if we dared advance far into such a battle 
• of giants, we need not. Like the little boy at the 
peep-show, we can pay our penny and please our- 
selves. The difficulty is, obviously — as it will prob- 
ably always be where any considerable number of 
these wise men are compared — to choose which 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 45 

charmer we will be happy with. It is true, to be 
sure, that an argument may be made in favor of the 
method of forming an independent opinion and 
neolectino^ the critics; thouo-h this method involves 
the waste of a great quantity of fine writing, and 
the labor of careful thinking. 

This assortment of judgments would not be com- 
plete without that of the London Athenceum^ which 
greeted " Pickwick" at its first appearance with a 
characteristic assertion. This paper, giving the only 
or almost the only wholly contemptuous opinion put 
forth by any periodical of any pretentions to stand- 
ing, allowed Mr. Dickens only " cleverness." It 
said : 

"The writer of the periodical which is now before 
us has great cleverness, but he runs closely on some 
leading hounds in the humorous pack, and when he 
gives tongue (perchance a vulgar tongue) he reminds 
you of the baying of several deep dogs who have 
gone before. The Papers of the ' Pickwick Club,' 
in fact, are made up of two pounds of Smollett, three 
ounces of Sterne, a handful of Hook, a dash of gram-' 
matical Pierce Egan — incidents at pleasure, served* 
up with an original sauce piquante." 

In the mass of contemporary criticism on " Pick- 
wick," there is one curious omission — that is, it 
would be curious if the book were first published 
in 1870. This is, the omission of any objection to 
the tippling and actual drunkenness which dribbles 
all over the story. This is certainly one of its least 
agreeable traits ; but it does not seem to have been 
60 much as observed in its day. Even the carping 



46 CHARLES DICKENS, 

Dissenters do not say a word about the pineapple 
rum which was Mr. Stiggins's " particular wanity." 
The truth is, of course, that tippling was simply 
universal in England in those days ; although the 
heavy swilling, so usual in good society in the time 
of the Regency, had in great measure gone by. In 
the year 1835, the Reverend Heman Humphrey, 
D. D,, President of Amherst College, made a tour 
in Great Britain, France, and Belgium, of which his 
account was published in two volumes, 12mo, 1838; 
and a decidedly intelligent and readable book it is, 
besides aifording many contemporary hints about 
society, manners, etc., which illustrate points in 
" Pickwick" in particular. As to this very question 
of temperance, the good Doctor, who carried cre- 
dentials from the American Temperance Society to 
the British and Foreign Temperance Society, devotes 
thirty-nine horrified pages of mingled moans and 
mathematics to a detailed exposition of the frightful 
prevalence of alcoholism amongst all ranks and con- 
ditions of men in Great Britain. 

This is the proper place to note one other similar 
piece of accidental testimony to the truthfulness of 
the descriptions in " Pickwick." It amounts only to 
this: that the fearful strings of verbal outrage 
hurled at each other by Messrs. Pott and Shirk, the 
rival editors of Eatanswill, are probably as little 
caricature as anything in the book — or, for that 
matter, in any book. To a reader of this generation, 
those virulent invectives seem extravagant. But 
Dr. Humphrey, in his " Tour," while he admits that 
the English newspapers are edited with much ability, 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 47 

says, ia substance, that the British press is even 
licentious in its freedom of utterance; that it would 
be out of the question to coin a term of denunciation 
more bitter than those which are constantly used 
with perfect impunity ; and that practically there is 
no restraint to keep the press even within the bounds 
of reason and public safety. It must have been a 
pretty free-spoken company of editors who could 
wear such an appearance to an American. But it is 
of the newspapers of that very year that Anderson 
(History of British Journalism, ii., 221, et seq.) 
speaks, when he says that their style, " although vastly 
improved upon that of former times, would startle 
those who are accustomed to the more subdued tone 
and calmer language of modern newspaper controver- 
sy." The London Times^ in 1835, called Mr. Macau- 
lay "Mr. Babbletongue Macaulay;" and said that 
another member of parliament borrowed his second 
name from a gin-shop, which his father must have 
kept; and it always called the great Irish orator, 
O'Connell, " the big beggarman." Mr. Disraeli, in an- 
swering the Globe (in the Times) said, that that paper 
" tosses its head with all the fluttering indignation 
and affected scorn of an enraged and supercilious 
waiting-woman ;" and another letter in the Times 
calls an obnoxious editor " an obscure animal," and 
*' the thing who concocts the meagre sentences and 
drivels out the rheumy rhetoric of the Globe.'' 
Another letter in the Times, a little afterward, con- 
tained the following fine specimen of stercoraceous 
literature : " It is not, then, my passion for notoriety 
that has induced me to tweak the editor of the Globe 



48 CHARLES DICKENS, 

by the nose, and to inflict sundry kicks on the baser 
part of his base person — to make him eat dirt, and 
his own words, fouler than any filth; but be- 
cause I wished to show to the world what a misera- 
ble poltroon — what a craven dullard — what a literary 
scarecrow — what a mere thing, stuffed with straw 
and rubbish," etc. These letters, it should be re- 
membered, were part of the regular political con- 
troversies, of the paper, and were semi-editorial 
therefore, and substantially the utterances of the 
paper — not mere casual contributions. Once more : 
Mr. Disraeli, in his " Letters of Runnymede," after- 
ward published in a volume, called Lord John 
Russell "an infinitely small scarabreus — an insect ;" 
Palmerston and Grant, "two sleek and long-tailed 
rats;" and Lord William Bentinck, "one of those 
mere lees of debilitated humanity and exhausted 
nature which the winds periodically waft to the 
hopeless breezes of their native cliffs," and " a driv- 
elling nabob, of weak and perplexed mind and 
grovelling spirit, " Where the foremost newspaper 
in the world, and the future Prime Minister of the 
British Empire, dealt in such gardy-loo rhetoric as 
that, it is not likely that two enraged, vulgar country 
editors would fall behind them in desperation or in 
dirt. Dickens himself was a newspaper man too, 
and quite as slangy and fluent as was necessary. 
But he did not exceed the reality in Pott and Slurk^ 
not even he could caricature the controversial edi- 
torials of that period. As easily make a black mark 
on charcoal. 

The extent and variety of the foregoing citations 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 49 

and comments was for the sake of depicting with 
some degree of fulness the kind and quantity of 
excitement produced by the advent into literature 
of this powerful new luminary. Beyond the Atlan- 
tic, the welcome was at least as hearty, and the 
admiration at least as enthusiastic. In this case, as 
in abundance of other similar ones, remoteness of 
situation and consequent freedom from English local 
prejudices and conventional habits, enabled the 
American public to rival and often to surpass the Eng- 
lish public in appreciating the work of English minds. 

The North American lievieio for January, 1843, 
begins an article upon the " American Notes" with 
a retrospect that forcibly describes the first Ameri- 
can welcome to Boz. It says : 

" the name of Charles Dickens started into a 

celebrity, which, for extent and intensity, for its 
extraordinary influence upon social feelings and even 
political institutions, and for the strength of favor- 
able regard and even warm personal attachment by 
which it has been accompanied all over the world, 
we believe is without a parallel in the history of let- 
ters. The demand for the " Pickwick Papers" grew 
greater and greater with every succeeding number. 
English gentlemen, travelling on the Continent, left 
orders to have them forwarded to their address. At 
home, everybody who could aflbrd his monthly shil- 
ling, hurried to pay it on the morning of the pub- 
lishing day ; and with an adroitness for money- 
making, commonly supposed to mark the American 
only, boys let out their copies to those who could not 
afford to buy, at a penny an hour. 

3 



50 CHARLES DICKENS, 

" Among readers in the United States, the eager- 
ness to get these papers was to the full as general 
and intense. They were republished in every form 
of newspaper, weekly and monthly journal, and 
close-printed volume; the incessant industry of the 
metropolitan presses proved hardly equal to supply- 
ing the country demand ; and long before the adven- 
tures of Mr. Pickwick were brought to a conclusion, 
the name of Charles Dickens was not only a classical 
name in English literature, but one ever after to be 
spoken with an affectionate warmth of higher value 
than the widest lettered renown. . . . 

"We had heard intelligent Englishmen express 
much surprise at the American popularity of Mr. 
Dickens. They supposed his works were too na- 
tional in spirit and tendency, too local in their wit 
and allusions, to be fully enjoyed anywhere out of 
England ; and when they found that his American 
readers far outnumbered his English, because his 
works were more widely and cheaply circulated here 
than at home, they were astonished at so startling 
and unexpected a fact. The truth is, that Mr. Dick- 
ens's peculiar genius is nearly as well understood 
here as it is in London. " . . . . 

Another, periodical, not perhaps so widely circu- 
lated, nor of so high reputation as a critical author- 
ity, but certainly not at all inferior to the North 
American in point of ability and trustworthiness — 
the Christian JExaminer^ in its issue of November, 
1839, has an article twelve pages long, remarkably 
careful and well thought out, which is in form a 
review of " Oliver Twist," and which powerfully 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 51 

though indirectly testifies to the depth and extent 
of Dickens's popularity, by assuming its universality 
and intensity, and going into an elaborate examina- 
tion of the reasons of it. This paper is signed J. S. 
D., and is no doubt by that competent and careful 
scholar John S. Dwight. It is beyond comparison the 
best single view of Mr. Dickens's abilities and char- 
acter as a writer, which had appeared up to that time, 
and it is doubtful whether it has been surpassed since. 

The reviewer recognized, first of all, the two chief 
and greatest of all Mr. Dickens's qualities, his power 
of vision and of representation ; and along with these, 
the sympathy with what is good and the enmity for 
what is bad, which give him so sure a hold on the 
heart : 

" As we read along, pleasant amusement deepened 
into intense and pure emotion ; and after these were 
gone, there remained a substantial product in our 
hands. Our faith, as well as our knowledge of the 
world, had grown. We had been seeing worse ideas 
of human life exposed than had ever entered our 
thought before, and exposed in such a way that we 
could still see the evil subordinated to the good, and 
that there is yet more to be hoped, than to be feared, 
for man. We had been led through the labyrinths 
of a great city by a true and wise observer, — one 
who goes everywhere into the midst of facts, and 
does not get lost among them ; one who dares to 
look into the rotten parts of the world, and yet for- 
gets not its beauty as a whole, but still has faith 
enough to love this human nature, whose manners he 
knows so well." .... 



52 CHAELES DICKENS, 

" In seeking now what qualities go to the making 
up of such a work, the first thing that suggests itself 
is, the writer's astonishing power of observation and 

description This writer's great^ power, which 

lies not so much in any ideal invention, as in strong 
and accurate perception of things as they are, beto- 
kens a rare tendency, and one still more rarely 
favored by our modes of education." . . . . " He is 
a genius in his way. He sees things with his own 
eyes. There is fine integrity and healthfulness in 
his perceptions. Objects make their full impression 
upon his open senses ; he accepts the whole without 
evasion, and trusts it, inasmuch as it is real ; and he 
paints it to us again in quick, bold, expressive 
strokes, with a free manner, marred by no misgiv- 
ings, yet modest. He is as objective as Goethe 
could desire. It is the thirig which he gives us, and 
not himself. He is neither egotist nor imitator. 
No't from works of poetry or romance, from the 
classics, or critical codes founded upon them, does 
he take his suggestion and his model, but from his 
own vivid observations, from what ho has seen and 
lived, and this, too, keeping his own personality in 
the background, thereby escaping the fault of many 
of the most genuine writers of the day, the stamp 
of genius upon whose pages is not enough to 
reconcile us to their morbid self-consciousness. 
He has the health and many of the best qualities 
of Scott, only not his learning and fondness for the 
past." 

The reviewer further specifies as the office of the 
new romancer, " describing low life in great cities, 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 53 

and hitting oiF the conventionalisms and pretensions 
of all classes." He adverts to the wonderful abun- 
dance of his personages, and to their equally won- 
derful individuality; to the similarly striking dis- 
tinctness of his descriptions of things and places ; 
to his abounding and never-failing humor; to his 
great power in the pathetic; to his genial satire, 
healthy in tone, and just in purpose and direction; 
and to his vivid sympathy with what is best in the 
spirit of the age in which he lives. Thus, although 
only discussing directly one or two of his works, the 
clear analysis and accurate judgment of this critic 
has evolved a quite complete and detailed portrait 
of his subject. 

This discussion of the brilliant opening scene of 
Mr. Dickens's career needs a few further observa- 
tions. These refer to a feature in "Pickwick," 
which has often been commented on, and about 
which the author himself seems to have, for some 
reason, avoided any very clear explanation. This is 
the gradual development within the book itself, from 
the mere string of comic sketches which was its 
character at first, to an actual novel, with a frame- 
Avork of events, if not a regular plot, character, and 
a moral. A number of the early reviews of the book 
animadvert upon this inconsistency, and with much 
gravity and kindness show how incorrect it is, and 
how the author might have done better. Mr. Dick- 
ens himself, a little sophistically, in his Preface to 
" Pickwick," thus deals with the charge : 

"It has been observed of Mr. Pickwick that there 
is a decided change in his character as these pages 



54 CHAKLES DICKENS, 

proceed, and that he becomes more good and more 
sensible. I do not think this change will appear 
forced or nnnatural to my readers, if they will reflect 
that in real life the peculiarities and oddities of a 
man who has anything whimsical about him, gen- 
erally impress us first, and that it is not until we 
are better acquainted with him that we usually begin 
to look below these superficial traits, and to know 
the better part of him." 

That is all very well, but assuredly it is an after- 
thought. Of all Mr. Dickens's novels, "Pickwack" 
is incomparably the most spontaneous, the most 
unconscious, the most unsophisticated. No one who 
is familiar with his w^orks can fail to observe that 
" Pickwick" was not written with a purpose, whereas 
most of the others were. When "Pickwick" was be- 
gun, the fact is, that Mr. Dickens did not yet know 
that he was a novel-writer. "Pickwick" formed of 
itself as he went on with it; and yielding to his own 
inspiration with the infallible tact of genius, he let it 
form. It was this influence — the free working of his 
own creative power — that developed Mr. Pickwick 
into a real character, instead of the empty caricature 
of a sciolist, as it also shaped the whole story round 
him. It has often been intimated that the book 
w^as meant to attack the system of the English 
courts of law" and imprisonment for debt. The in- 
ternal evidence is to the contrary; as was just said, 
the book was not w^ritten with any purpose except 
to write the book. It is as absolutely clear of 
secondary motives as the story of David and Jona- 
than. It is exactly this perfectly spontaneous, fresh, 



HIS LIFE AND WOKKS. 55 

open, frank, pictorial, unpremeditated, unconscious 
quality which renders "Pickwick" in some respects 
the best of all Mr. Dickens's publications, and even 
yet the prime favorite of many of his admirers. A 
certain zealous lover of this joyous, fun-bubbling 
book has even been heard to assert that it grows 
yet ; that every time he reads it he finds in it — not 
something he had not seen before, but something 
that loas not in it before. 

"Pickwick" began to appear March 1st, 1836. 
" Oliver Twist" was commenced in JBentley'^s 3Iis- 
ce^/a??y, February 1, 1837, and was published in book 
form toward the end of 1838. During much of this 
time the two stories were written together, part by 
part, just fast enough to satisfy the*l'equirements of 
the press. "Pickwick" had carried the world by 
storm with its inexhaustible laughter. " Oliver 
Twist," reversing tlie process, set the world in tears. 
It was a second unexpected revelation, and showed 
that the great master of fun was at least as great 
a master of pathos ; that he could also deal with the 
terrible. Instead of a mere comedian, he stood forth 
an irresistible governor of three of the strongest 
elements of humanity, stirring at his will the depths 
of laughter, of sympathy, of horror. The death-bed 
of the pauper mother; the sufferings and perils of 
Oliver; the infamies of the criminal life of London; 
the inexpressible brutality of Bumble and the poor- 
house, of Noah Claypole, of Mr. William Sikes, and 
Fang the scoundrelly police magistrate; the still 
deeper abomination of Fagin and his thief-school ; 
the murder of Nancy, pursuit and death of Sikes; 



56 CHARLES DICKENS, 

the horrors of Fagin's last hours — were a series of 
pictures so utterly frightful, yet so blazing with the 
terrible light of their perfect truthfulness — and, 
moreover, were so astonishingly disclosed, as it were 
from close beneath the very feet of the readers, as 
if a trap-door into Tophet had been opened in their 
very parlor-floor — that the public was actually both 
frightened and put to a stand on the question of the 
morality of such disclosures. It was no wonder. 
In society, if not in the individual, the exposure of 
its defects is pretty certain to arouse what a wit 
has called "the virtuous indignation of a guilty 
conscience;" and the first effort of this particular 
faculty is pretty likely to be an attempt to divert 
the charge of evil doing to the person who reveals 
it, as the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates, having 
stolen a handkerchief, cried "Stop thief!" with par- 
ticular zeal. In his Preface to a later edition of 
" Oliver Twist," Mr. Dickens has very squarely and 
forcibly answered his critics of this sort. After 
observing, with satirical emphasis, that the story 
had been " objected to on high moral grounds in some 
high moral quarters," he says : 

" It was, it seemed, a coarse and shocking circum- 
stance, that some of the characters in these pages 
are chosen from the most criminal and degraded 
of London's population ; that Sikes is a thief, and 
Fagin a receiver of stolen goods ; that the boys are 
pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute." 

Mr. Dickens's justification of the means and end 
of his story is indignant, powerful, and conclusive, 
equally in justifying the direct and plain-spoken way 



1118 LIFE AND WOKKS. 57 

in which he exhibited criminal England to respect- 
able England, and in reproving the squeamish, selfish 
cowardice that would fain ignore the evils it was 
too indolent or careless to try to cure. 

" I have yet to learn," he says, with a broad phi- 
losophy as true as it is bold, " that a lesson of the 
purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil. 
I have always believed this to be a recognized and 
established truth, laid down by the greatest men the 
world has ever seen, constantly acted upon by the 
best and wisest natures, and confirmed by the reason 
and experience of every thinking mind. I saw no 
reason, when I wrote this book, why the dregs of 
life, so long as their speech did not oifend the ear, 
should not serve the purpose of a moral, at least, as 
well as its froth and cream. Nor did I doubt that 
there lay festering in Saint Giles's as good materials 
toward the truth as any to be found in Saint 
James's." 

This line of argument is followed at some length, 
and w^th some very apt illustrations and contrasts. 
These point out that when stories of criminal life do 
harm, it is not because they are stories of criminal 
life, but because they tell lies about it, and represent 
it as good, and not as bad. The truth about crime 
will exhibit it as the most utterly forlorn and miser- 
able of human conditions. In discussing the subject, 
Mr. Dickens does skilful justice to the motives of 
the " Beggar's Opera" and of " Paul Clifford," whose 
real object, fanciful treatment, and unpractical at- 
mosphere, as he shows, prevent them from working 
any great positive evil. He could not gracefully, 
3* 



5S CHAKLES DICKENS, 

nor indeed properly, make a direct attack on Mr. 
Ainsworth, who, in January, 1839, succeeded him 
as editor of Bentleifs Miscellany^ and whose infa- 
mous devil's gospel of " Jack Sheppard" was then 
printed in that magazine. But the very silence of 
the preface to *' Oliver Twist" on that really scoun- 
drelly book — which might very well be reckoned the 
reply of the Fagin school to Oliver Twist's indict- 
ment — and the solicitous specification of the two 
other most prominent English belles-lettres com- 
positions based on criminal life, constitute a very 
intelligible definition of opinion. Mr. Dickens to- 
tally disapproved of the Ainsworth school — the thief- 
breeding school — of literature. Abundance of cases 
are on record, and proved by legally valid testimony, 
wdiere the reading of "Jack Sheppard," or presence 
at its dramatized representation, has turned reason- 
ably decent boys into thieves and burglars. But 
nobody, young or old, ever felt or could feel any 
temptation to a life of crime from reading " Oliver 
Twist." Even the rollicking, artificial merriment of 
the Artful Dodger and his chums, does not hide the 
nastiness of their physical condition, nor the hard- 
ship of their slavery to Fagin on one hand, and to 
the police on the other. And if any man has been 
inspired to imitate the way of living and dying of 
Fagin or of Sikes, or any woman the career of Nancy, 
it has not been heard of, and would not be believed 
if it had. 

The debtors' prison scenes in " Pickwick" were 
described because the description was naturally part 
of the sto]-y as it grew under its writer's hands; and 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 59 

tlie misery of Jingle and Job Trotter, the ruin ol" the 
fortunate legatee who was defendant in a proceeding 
for contempt, and the death of the twenty years' 
Chancery prisoner, were painted in as pathetic ac- 
cessories only, and with no other purpose, just as the 
'relapse into good sense of Mrs. Weller on her death- 
bed, and the ready kindness of her husband, were 
used in like manner. But there is a detail, a strength, 
a directness, a distinct feeling of purpose about the 
pictures of poor-house life in " Oliver Twist," that 
unavoidably suggests indignation and the intention 
to expose and reform. 

Still more clear is this intentional reformatory 
purpose visible in " Nicholas Nickleby," wdiich was 
begun shortly after "Pickwick" was compltited, and 
was issued in shilling numbers. This story did what 
few novels have ever done ; it substantially destroyed 
an abominable abuse — the cheap Yorkshire schools, 
of which " Dotheboys Hall" was a representation. 
There are various pleasures in successful authorship : 
the consciousness of exerting rare and high powers 
of mind; of affording pleasure to others; of wield- 
ing power over others ; of being admired ; of being 
beloved ; but very few have been the romancers who 
have done all those things, and have at the same 
time advanced the interests of humanity by actually 
working the destruction of an evil or the establish- 
ment of a good. It is often said that Cervantes 
" laughed away the chivalry of Spain ;" although it 
is questionable whether " Don Quixote" Vv as not the 
expression, rather than the guide, of the spirit of its 
a^re. But there can be no doubt about the influence 



60 CliAIiLES DICKENS, 

of " Nicholas Nickleby" on the Yorkshire schools. 
In his preface to the recent editions of the book, 
Mr. Dickens evidently expresses his belief that it 
was his work that exterminated them. The school- 
masters themselves thought so too, for divers of 
them threatened lawsuits, proposed assault and bat- 
tery, and even pretended to remember interviews 
with the author while he was, under false pretences, 
gathering materials. None, however, of the threat- 
ened revenges were inflicted. Now-a-days, no man 
need be afraid to expose, in good faith and in a 
proper manner, any abuse. It is centuries since 
Voltaire was beaten and Sir John Coventry's nose 
slit, in return for satire too true to be answered with 
either reason or wit. These threats were made 
during the progress of the book ; and in the preface 
issued at its final publication in book-form, the author 
quietly but boldly affirmed all his charges, and defied 
all and sundry who might attempt to prove them 
false. No such attempt was made. 



CHAPTER II. 

Established Fame. 

"Master Humphrey's Clock" was begun in 
weekly numbers in April, 1840, at three-pence a num- 
ber; and so great was the author's reputation by 
this time, that the publishers began to issue it with 
40,000 copies, to which they we-re at once compelled 
to add 20,000 more. This work as at first designed, 
was in some sense a failure. It was to have con- 
sisted, the author says, " for the most part of de- 
tached papers, but was to include one continuous 
story, to be resumed from time to time, with such 
indefinite intervals between each period of resump- 
tion as mioht best accord with the existences and 
capabilities of the proposed miscellany." To be put 
ofi" with a " miscellany," here and there beset with 
fragments of a story, the reading public would not 
consent. They very quickly showed their impatience 
for another whole work. They experienced a dis- 
satisfaction, almost as distinct, though not as in- 
tense, as that of the Highland chieftain in " Glenfin- 
las," whose companion had gone out from the soli- 
tary hut in bad company, and, instead of coming 
back whole, was flung down the chimney, one bleed- 
ing limb at a time. After three numbers, when, 
says the author, " I had already been made uneasy 



62 CHARLES DICKENS, 

by tlie desultory character of that work, and when, 
I believe, my readers had thorouohly participated 
the feeling," he began a story — " The Old Curiosity 
Shop," and instantly the work was a delight and a 
success to both author and readers. After this, 
" Barnaby Rudge" followed, and then a little piece of 
the " Clock," enough to preserve the form of things, 
was appended. In these " Clock" papers it was that 
Mr. Dickens, at the express solicitation of friends, 
undertook to revive the delightful memories of 
*' Pickwick," by resurrecting Mr. Pickwick himself 
and the Wellers. It was scarcely more than their 
ghosts, however, wdio came. It is true that they 
were not such foolish unrealities as the various 
" spiritualist" communications from great poets and 
orators, but they were dim and pale enough, and at 
most were received with respectful politcfiess. It is 
not to be wondered at that even Mr. Dickens failed 
to reanimate his dead. Shakspeare failed to do it. 
It could be done if the writer could return backward 
along the years, and replace himself where he was 
before ; not otherwise. 

In the "Old Curiosity Shop" was created the 
character of " Little Nell," the most famous of all 
the author's pathetic children, and perhaps as 
famous as any in literature — even as the Mignon of 
Goethe, a being as pure and good as Nell, though as 
impassioned as the little English girl is snow-cold. Of 
both this story, and its successor, " Barnaby Rudge," 
it is to be observed, that they are not of that class of 
Mr. Dickens's novels that are written wit^ an extra- 
literary purpose ; they are novels only, and not like- 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 03 

wise assaults on abuses. " Barnaby Rudge" is one of 
the author's two historical novels, and shows a respect- 
able degree of power in that department of fiction. 
Rut Mr. Dickens's peculiar gift, and his best gift, 
was not the accumulation and delineation of such 
items as paint a past period — costume, antiquarian 
lexicography, archaeology generally. These are 
transitory, and are already dead. There have been 
great masters in the art of grouping and. painting 
them, no doubt. But the art of this master was in 
painting the qualities of humanity, not of its cos- 
tume — the feelings, sentiments, and passions that are 
everlasting as man. It might therefore have been 
expected that this part of the work would usurp 
upon the other in the composition of historical fic- 
tion ; 'and so it was accordingly. The ignoblenesses 
of Miggs and Tappertit, the brutalities of Dennis 
and Hugh, the gross, stolid obstinacy of old Willetts, 
the steadfast goodness of Yarden, the bright, loving 
sweetness of Dolly, the misery of the Widow Rudge, 
the fantastic, innocent vagaries of her crack-brained 
darling — and we may perhaps add to this catalogue 
of human qualities those which Grip, the raven, had 
acquired from human teaching — these are the staple 
of the story. The formal . courtliness of Sir John 
Chester, the excesses of the riots, the feeble folly 
of Lord George Gordon, which are as significant as 
anything historical in the book, have far less of 
chronology than of psychology about them. Almost 
the same judgment is correct, it may perhaps be as 
well to add here, of the " Tale of Two Cities." It 
is a story of human passions, of misery, crime, guilt, 



64 CHARLES DICKENS, 

revenge, heroism, love, and happiness. And if the 
lack of the properly historical element does not so 
strongly appear in this novel as in " Barnaby Rudge," 
the reason is clear: it is, that the period was one 
that, beyond any other in history, boiled and burned 
with passion ; so that, in fact, the novelist who writes 
a romance of the French Revolution must, if his 
story is to seem truthful, write a story of psy- 
chology. 

In this sketch of the succession of Mr. Dickens's 
earlier novels, no reference has been made to his 
biography of Joseph Grimaldi — in his day a celebrity, 
a personage of much professional ability as a 
"clown," and not without other merits as a man 
and a citizen. Grimaldi died in 1837. Mr. Dickens, 
as a rising author, not afraid of hard work, was 
induced to prepare this memoir, which was published, 
in two volumes, in 1840, and which neither increased 
nor diminished the reputation of the writer, nor, it 
is believed, of the subject. It is simply a faithfully 
executed and sufficient biography. 

It was during the issue of the "Pickwick Papers" 
that Dickens married. His wife was the daughter 
of Mr. George Hogarth, of whom mention has al- 
ready been made. 

By the time that " Barnaby Rudge" was finished, 
during the year 1841, even the vigorous and enduring 
frame of the new novelist was sensibly fatigued. 
No wonder. In six years he had fully established 
a new department of romance, erecting a reputation 
which would have remained a lasting one without 
another word or volume j and had proved himself, 



HIS LIFE AND WOBKS. 65 

besides his unquestioned supremacy as a novelist, a 
laborious and able workman in three other depart- 
ments of literary labor — reporting, editing, and 
biography. The exertion thus invested was intense 
as well as enjoyable ; for no quality of genius is 
more invariable than the intensity which marks its 
activity. No human standard of measurement can 
estimate 'the total of labor represented by the twenty 
volumes or thereabouts which the young man of 
twenty-nine had produced in six years. The very 
penmanship of so many pages is no inconsiderable 
accumulation of labor. The contrivance of all these 
stories, the adaptation to them of the characters and 
groups supplied by the mind, the shaping out of 
plot and dialogue, situation and catastrophe — con- 
stitute another far higher and immeasurably greater 
body of labor ; and behind all these was that vast 
mass of seeing, understanding, and remembering, 
which may be called the professional training and 
experience of the author, and which was really the 
whole of his past life, including both the circum- 
stances of his own home and social position, and the 
extraordinary series of researches and studies that 
he was always making into the actualities of the 
humanity around him. 

The mere quantity of la~bor involved in all this, 
leaving its quality out of the question, and treating 
it merely as an enterprise in acquiring and recording 
knowledo-e, is somethinsj tremendous. The higher 
mental operations are not less exhausting, but more 
so, than the lower; and it is not wonderful, but 
natural, that by this time a vacation was necessary 



66 CHARLES DICKENS, 

even to this vividly energetic, swift, and enduring 
organism. 

Mr. Dickens decided upon a visit to America; 
and, embarking with his wife in January, 1842, he 
reached Boston on the 22d, went by New York to 
Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond, then by 
York, Pa., and Pittsburg, down the Ohio to Cin- 
cinnati, Cairo, and St. Louis, thence back to Cincin- 
nati, northward to the Lakes, to Niagara, and down 
the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec, and 
thence by Lake Champlain back to New York, from 
which he re-embarked for England, June 7th. 

One principal consideration which decided Mr. 
Pickens to turn his course to the United States 
on this vacation tour was, to secure, if possible, the 
passage of an International Copynght Law, in which 
he was himself more deeply interested than any 
other Englishman. Almost nothing is on record, 
unless it be among his own private papers, of the 
direction and method of any actual efforts in this 
direction ; but, at any rate, he did not receive any 
encouragement that such a law could be procured. 
The fact is quite as discreditable and ungraceful as 
any of the various injustices that have marked the 
dealings of England and the United States with 
each other's literature. It is curious that very soon 
afterward Mr. Dickens himself, in editing the " Pic- 
nic Papei'S," a compilation published as a contribu- 
tion toward the support of the family of a deceased 
literary friend, should have been so ill-advised as to 
embody in it the whole of Mr. Neal's amusing and 
spirited " Charcoal Sketches," without any leave 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 67 

asked, pecuniary acknowledgment to tlie autlior, or 
even any reference to its authorship, except merely 
a statement that the said sketches, by an American 
writer, had been included in the collection. So diffi- 
cult is it, even with the best intentions, to be always 
consistent. 

Upon his return to England, Mr. Dickens pub- 
lished his "American Notes," being his record of 
experiences and opinions during his tour, and which 
was received in this country with acclamations of 
bitter displeasure, whose memory is still green, and 
whose unreasonableness and violence were smartly 
parodied in their turn in Messrs. Aytoun & Martin's 
*' Ballads of Bon Gaultier," in the extravagant lines 
beginning, 

" Sneak across the wide Atlantic, worthless London's puling child !" 

which are supposed to express the fury of some in- 
jured Columbian, conscious of having been atro- 
ciously abused by the " child." 

To a judicious and fair-minded American who 
reads the " Notes" now, this passion of anger, while 
not unintelligible, looks extremely ridiculous.- The 
book is very sprightly and entertaining; it is — what 
cannot be said of all the narratives of English travels 
in America, or American travels in England, for that 
matter — entirely gentlemanly in respect of person- 
alities and social decorum ; it is colored distinctly 
throughout, not with enmity, but with liking and 
good-nature ; in short, considered as a whole it is 
distinctly friendly and laudatory. One cannot help 
suspecting that the entire silence of the book upon 



68 CHARLES DICKENS, 

the extravagant and over-demonstrative series of en- 
tertainments, receptions, and what not, which beset 
the traveller's feet at every town, may have been an 
unwelcome surprise and disappointment, and that 
every manager of a ball, a dinner, or testimonial, 
finding neither himself nor his festivity so much as 
hinted at, became therefore an unfriend to the thank- 
less guest. There certainly was a terrible series of 
these performances, and one which altogether justi- 
fied the extremely ludicrous caricature of them pub- 
lished a couple of years afterward in "Martin 
Chuzzlewit." And the fact that nobody could learn 
from the book that any such transaction had taken 
place anywhere, is proof of dignity and good sense 
in the visitor ; neither of liking or disliking for the 
incensers who afterward with such a sudden shifting 
of parts became the incensed. 

Probably our nation, now twenty-eight years older 
than it was — the period is more than a quarter of its 
whole age as a nation — may have then possessed less 
justness and steadiness of self-estimation, and may 
therefore have been touchier than now about foreign 
opinions. But doubtless the real origin of the anger 
was the thorough contempt and disgust which Mr. 
Dickens expressed so freely, not only for the unut- 
terably nasty American habit of tobacco-chewing, 
but for three strong, unscrupulous, influential, and 
noisy American interests : first, slavery ; second, the 
politicians as a class; and third, the newspapers 
as a whole. The vastest and most venomous of 
these, slavery, is dead ; but in those days it is quite 
certain that by as much as Mr. Dickens was right in 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 69 

avowing his unbounded hate and horror for slavery, 
by so much he would surely be hated and abused by 
its defenders — that is, by the most vociferous and 
numerically powerful body of public sentiment in 
the United States. It was only four years before 
that a pro-slavery mob had murdered Lovejoy at 
Alton ; only a week after Mr. Dickens was at Wash- 
ington occurred the infamous attempt of the South- 
ern congressmen and their allies to gag and repri- 
mand John Quincy Adams for his splendid fearless 
advocacy of the right of petition on behalf' of the 
abolitionists. That long, last, enormous wave of 
diabolical intensification which first broke in the 
Kansas wars, and finally burst and ebbed back into 
death in the Rebellion, was steadily and rapidly 
lifting the level of pro-slavery excitement. Enter- 
taining and expressing the views that he did on the 
slavery question, Mr. Dickens was just as absolutely 
certain of furious and uncompromising enmity from 
the majority of voters in the United States, as he 
would have been for the same reason of rejection as 
a candidate at the Cincinnati or the Charleston Con- 
vention. 

Not content with this, he had dealt forth a repro- 
bation as distinct, if not as extreme, upon the only 
two other interests that were influential enough — 
unless the collective sects professing Christianity be 
excepted — to materially damage his popularity with 
the public of the United States, and vengeful enough 
to be sure to do it — the politicians and the newspa- 
pers. There is something extremely delightful to a 
decent citizen in his sarcastic description of the im- 



70 CHARLES DICKENS, 

pression he received from Congress, and the specifi- 
cations he furnishes of the manners and customs that 
produced the impression. And to any man of good 
literary culture and respectable manners, his equally 
distinct reproof of some of the habits of our news- 
papers is almost equally refreshing. Our newspa- 
pers have greatly improved since that time ; our 
politicians not so much ; though Congress is of late 
years free from the bear-garden department, which 
went away along with the slave system that pro- 
duced and nourished it. 

It is most heartily to be wished that a censor as 
keen, as bold, as powerful, and as just as Charles 
Dickens might handle our national besetting sins 
regularly at least once every twenty-five years, with- 
out notice. 

During his journey, Mr. Dickens diligently pros- 
ecuted his studies of human nature, and particularly 
in the pathological department. He visited, with 
striking frequency and interest, lunatic asylums, 
prisons, and punitive, reformatory, and charitable 
institutions generally, studying earnestly both the 
individual characters of the inmates and the pecu- 
liarities of the institutions themselves. He devoted 
four or five thousand words to a full account, with 
quotations from Dr. Howe, of the wonderful case of 
Laura Bi-idgman, which made a very deep impression 
upon him. These researches were not only congenial 
to the benevolent disposition of the man, but were 
part of his professional studies — his regular system 
of collecting materials for publication. 

The " Notes" gave no very complete satisfaction 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 71 

anywhere ; for while the Americans complained that 
they were unfriendly and unjust, the English critics 
found fault with them for not furnishing information 
enough. There was no statistical matter, no arith- 
metic, no political economy. This was a good deal 
like blaming a florist for not furnishing his custom- 
ers with a good article of shaving soap. 

In short, the ''American Notes" were in fact 
friendly and not unfriendly; just and not unjust; 
the book was noticeably modest, reticent, and well- 
mannered. Moreover, it was, as it should be, Mr. 
Dickens's account of what he saw, as he saw it, and 
told in his manner. If there are in it any variations 
from correctness of representation, the business of 
Americans is,flrst, to credit the author with common 
honesty, and second, to make those variations a 
means of better understanding the author. As he 
colored his pictures of America, so he did those of 
England ; and thus we can make the proper discount 
on all his delineations, whenever we wish to reduce 
them to an absolute standard of value. 

A feeble attempt to punish the imputed libels of 
the "Notes" was made by an anonymous writer pro- 
fessing to be '* an American Lady," who published 
" Change for American Notes," in 1843, in an octavo 
pamphlet, which succeeded no further than to show 
abundance of anger, but neither destroyed any of 
Mr. Dickens's statements nor established a success- 
ful counter-irritation by its treatment of English 
affairs. This latter enterprise was assuredly feasible, 
as Mr. Dickens had by this time sufliciently shown 
in his own terrible exposures of English criminals, 



72 CHARLES DICKENS, 

workhouses, cheap schools, and iDiisoiis. Indeed, it 
must have been a powerful hand that could have 
rivalled his gloomy and dreadful pictures of the 
short-comings of his own nation, a hundred and a 
thousand fold more unsparing, more sarcastic, more 
stinging, than his utterances about America. This 
consideration, obvious enough, seems to have been 
overlooked by his offended American contempora- 
ries; though doubtless its unconscious operation de- 
stroyed the force of whatever reply was attempted. 
At a later period, the thoughtful and finely-toned 
minds of Emerson and Hawthorne — not to specify 
any others — have placed on record a sufficient quan- 
tity of delicate and deliberately accurate animadver- 
sion upon English traits and English society, to con- 
stitute a sufficient answer to or retaliation for the 
indictment of Mr. Dickens, if such were needed. 
But those philosophical and clean-hearted students 
of humanity were as free from any intention to 
make out a case as Mr. Dickens himself A passage 
in the dedication or preface to Mr. Hawthorne's 
work, " Our Old Home," furnishes a parallel to the 
case of Mr. Dickens that is worth transcribing. 
Having set down his deliberate opinions about the 
English, he was, it appears, found fault with very 
much as Dickens was ; for he says : 

"To return to these poor sketches; some of my 
friends have told me that they evince an asperity of 
sentiment toward the English people that I ought 
not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to 
express. The charge surprises me, because, if it be 
true, I have written from a shallower mood than I 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. ^3 

supposed. I seldom come into personal relations 
with an Englishman without beginning to like him, 
and feeling my fiivorable impression wax stronger 
with the progress" of the acquaintance. I never stood 
in an English crowd without being conscious of he- 
reditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable 
that an American is continually thrown upon his 
national antagonism by some acrid quality in the 
moral atmosphere of England. These people think 
so loftily of themselves, and so contemptuously of 
everybody else, that it requires more generosity than 
I possess to keep always in perfectly good humor 

with them It is very possible that I may 

have said things which a profound observer of na- 
tional character would hesitate to sanction, though 
never any, I verily believe, that had not more or less 
of truth. If they be true, there is no reason in the 
world why they should not be said. Not an Eng- 
lishman of them all ever spared America for court- 
esy's sake or kindness." 

It is impossible not to transcribe further a single 
sentence of the truthful judgments thus reasserted, 
for the sake of comparison. In speaking of the 
ante-revolutionary conduct of England toward the 
colonies, Mr. Hawthorne thus summed up the Eng- 
lish: "It has required nothing less than the boorish- 
ness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contempt- 
uous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of 
one eye and often distorted of the other, that char- 
acterize this strange people, to compel us to be a 
great nation in our own right." 

In the " Concluding Remarks" of the " Notes," 
4 



V4 CHARLES DICKENS, 

Mr. Dickens gives the following as his judgment 
upon the real character of the Americans: "They 
are by nature frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and 

affectionate These qualities are natural, I 

implicitly believe, to the whole people." 

The unfavorable conclusions are in the nature of 
qualifications of this summary. Really, the " Brit- 
isher" is at least as lenient as the American, if these 
two sweeping generalizations may be taken as speci- 
mens; and in fact, unless the politics of 1842 be 
taken into the account, it is out of the question to 
understand why the "American Notes" were so 
angrily received. 

The first book that Mr. Dickens wrote after this 
vacation was " Martin Chuzzlewit," which appeared 
in numbers in 1843-4, and in which he repeated the 
dose which he had administered to America, but 
greatly intensified in pungency and enlarged in 
quantity. Here he compensated himself pretty 
fully for his previous abstinence from individual- 
izing, though still he represented classes, and not 
recognizable persons. And moreover, this deliberate 
elaborate repetition in this extremely telling form, 
of the allegations in the " Notes" was a most broad 
and full avowal that he stood by them all, that he 
reasserted them all. 

Of course the consequence was a pretty lively 
repetition of the American dissatisfaction, and an 
immense roar of hearty British laughter, which was 
unusually justifiable, inasmuch as both the British 
and the American types of the book were conceived 
and executed in a spirit scarcely, if at all, inferior to 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 15 

the brilliant, spontaneous overflowing fun of "Pick- 
wick." For many readers, Mrs. Gamp is a creation 
at least as enjoyable, not merely as any other of Mr. 
Dickens's creations, but as any other in the whole 
realm of fiction. 

A writer in 'Fmserh Magazine speaks with plain- 
ness of some of the American demonstrations of 
feeling about the " Notes" and " Chuzzlewit." He 
observes : 

" We will venture to say that none of the multifa- 
rious criminals who have fled for refuge to the bosom 
of the Republic, ever deserved a tenth part of the 
abuse that was lavished on Dickens. One of our 
friends happened to be at a theatre at Boston, and 
witnessed a travestie of Macbeth. Into the witches' 
cauldron were thrown all the most useless things on 
earth — Pennsylvania bonds, Mexican rifles, etc. etc. 
Finally, as a 7ie plus idtra^ was consigned to the in- 
fernal flame 'Dickens's last new w^ork,' amid the 
applausive laughter of the happy gods. 

"This unmerited abuse put the author on his met- 
tle. So he laid the scene of his next novel, " Martin 
Chuzzlewit," partly in America, in order to show 
that sensitive young people what he could say of 
them when no friendly recollections bound him to 
reticence. The exasperation, of course, increased 
tenfold; and if we may judge from the sentiments 
of casual statesmen, still continues unabated. We 
have heard more than one apathetic-looking stranger 
express a savage desire to ' lick' him the next oppor- 
tunity. On the former occasion they only licked 
his shoes. But, we suppose Dickens loould no more 



16 CHARLES DICKENS, 

dream of shoicing himself in Broadway than Hay- 
nail of revisiting London. 

"Mrs. Gamp, the virtual heroine of this tale, 
achieved a tremendous success. The United King- 
dom pealed and re-pealed with laughter, though we 
suspect that the mothers of England looked upon a 
monthly nurse as too sacred a character to be jested 
with." 

In "Martin Chuzzlewit" alone, there is a sufficient 
answer to our American anger, were any now needed. 
It might have been noticed, had men's minds been 
in those days in a condition fit for calm judgment, 
that the English scamps and butts in the book are 
worse than the American. Pecksniff alone, without 
Jonas Chuzzlewit, is worse than Jefferson Brick, 
Zephaniah Scadder, and Hannibal Chollop, with 
their newspaper, swindling, tobacco-spit, and mur- 
der-weapons, all heaped into one abomination. But 
the question needs at the present day only such dis- 
cussion as may serve for a historical adjustment, 
not for a controversial demonstration. Even in Eng- 
land, although there was laughter enough over Mrs. 
Hominy and Mr. Pogram, yet there was immeasur- 
ably more over Mrs. Gamp. 

In the summer of 1844, "Martin Chuzzlewit" hav- 
ing been completed, Mr. Dickens went with his fam- 
ily to Italy, where he remained for a year, establish- 
ing his headquarters at Genoa, and making visits to 
the principal cities of the peninsula. Returning to 
London at the end of that time, he j^roceeded to try 
the experiment of running a daily newspaper. lie 
collected a brilliant staff of writers, and issued, on 



HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 77 

January 21st, 1846, the first number of the Dally 
JVeics, a paper of the liberal politics which had been 
the chief editor's all his life. Mr. Andrews, in his " His- 
tory of British Journalism," thus records tlie result : 

" The Bally News got a good start in these troub- 
lous times. Founded just as the railway mania was 
on the wane, with Mr. Charles Dickens for its editor, 
it had passed safely, though not without great dan- 
ger, through all the incidents of a newspaper infancy 
it had been discovered that the brilliant sketch- 
ing pen of Dickens was not yet blunted enough to 
be steeped in the gall of political wn-iting— that the 
steel was too true and too highly tempered to carry 
the envenomed fluid, which ran off" it like limpid 
water, and made the leading articles simply wishy- 
washy ; so the editor had turned his attention to 
amusing his readers with the " Sketches from Italy," 
of which he gave them a column a day. But the 
new speculation drooped, and its best friends feared 
for its existence. It was then passed into the hands 
of Mr. Charles Wciitworth Dilke." 

This curiously awkward mess of mangled meta- 
phors only succeeds in trying to state — for such 
phras9S ar-d topics can hardly be said to succeed in 
stating— one of the reasons for the ill success of Mr. 
Dickens's experiment in newspaper editing. No 
doubt he was deficient in the brutalities then re- 
quired for a newspaper wn-iter ; but a far more im- 
portant disability was that of his vocation as a 
novelist, and the unfitness which that vocation 
entailed upon him for the sort of' writing required in 
a daily newspaper. As a novelist, he knew how to 



V8 CHARLES DICKENS. 

make pictures ; and painting them at his will, all the 
English-reading world was sure to be delighted. 
But the daily leader writer must make, not pictures, 
but points. He must deal w^ith things, not as he sees 
them, but as his readers see them, lie must speak, 
not whenever he is ready, but to order, at the mo- 
ment when the facts are ready. He must not com- 
plete a representation, with numerous accessory 
touches and a free discursive addition of whatever 
thoughts group and gather in his own mind, but 
must seize a single idea, state it with exclusive clear- 
ness and sharpness, weight it with a few sentences 
directly apropos, and fling it out. For the novelist, 
human beings are his centres of interest, and politi- 
cal and politico-economical phenomena are only 
background or still-life. For the editor, on the con- 
trary, these phenomena are the centres of interest, 
and if he made use of persons, it was, in those days, 
more as the cannibals use them — to sprinkle with the 
blood of his victims the daily banquet which he set 
for his ferocious customers. It is probable that the 
genial romancer may have aspired to exemplify a 
higher style of newspaper work; for assuredly, how- 
ever sharp and skilful he was in applying lancet and 
scalpel to social vices, he was not the man to do the 
bludgeon and brass-knuckle work of London polit- 
ical journalism thirty years ago, and cannot have 
meant to do it. And besides that he was thus unfit- 
ted both by mind and manners for the post, there 
was the additional consideration that the drudgery 
of a daily editor's life must necessarily exhaust the 
whole vitality of any human being whatever; and 



ESTABLISHED FAME. '^9 

that consequently, whenever it occurred to the chief 
editor of the Daily N'ews to write a new novel, or 
even to sketch a new character, he could not ; he 
had neither time nor strength? Like Samson among 
the Philistines, he must grind at the mill. Fortu- 
nately it was unnecessary for the present giant to 
carry on the parallel by destroying himself and the 
edifice of his inimitable exhibitions together, in 
order to escape from his servitude. Under the better 
technical skill of its new managers the N'ews became 
successful, influential, and profitable ; the novel wri- 
ter returned to his business ; and during the year 
1847 and 1848 appeared "Dealings with the Firm 
of Dombey & Son." This novel was written during 
a sojourn in Switzerland and France, and the con- 
cluding paragraph of its brief preface contains one 
of those confidential reminiscences which are both 
interesting as phenomena of an author's experience, 
and effective in winning the reader to a sense of real 
personal acquaintance with the writer. 

" I began this book," Mr. Dickens says, after an 
observation upon the character of Mr. Dombey, " by 
the Lake of Geneva, and went on with it for some 
months in France. The association between the 
writing and the place of writing is so strong in my 
mind, that at this day, although I know every chair 
in the little midshipman's house, and could swear to 
every pew in the church in which Florence was mar- 
ried, or to every young gentleman's bedstead in 
Doctor Blimber's establishment, I yet confusedly 
imagine Captain Cuttle as secluding himself from 
Mrs. MacStinger among the mountains of Switzer- 



80 CHARLES DICKENS. 

land. Similarly, when I am reminded by any chance 
of what it was that the waves were always saying, 
I wander in my fancy for a whole winter night about 
the streets of Paris — as I really did, with a heavy 
heart, on the night when my little friend and I parted 
forever." 

" Dombey and Son," like " Martin Chuzzlewit," has 
what may be called a distinct moral unity, resulting 
from the shaping of the characters and the story so 
as to teach a definite moral lesson. In Chuzzlewit, 
this lesson is the evil of selfishness ; and in the com- 
bining of this one quality with all the other qualities 
of so many of the characters, so that it colors both 
wdiat is good and what is bad in them, very great 
power and skill are shown. The frightful meanness 
of Pecksniff, the spite of one of his daughters and 
the silly frivolity of the other, the almost equally 
base greeds and hates of Jonas, the sharp, shallow, 
false cunning of Tigg, the impudent wickedness of 
the American land-agent, the fleshly brutality of Mrs. 
Gamp and Mrs. Prig, are all modulated to this key- 
note. Equally so are the energetic and penetrating 
intellect of old Martin, and the various good qualities 
which, with that curious indistinctness so common 
in heroes of novels, are imputed to young Martin 
rather than shown in him — an indistinctness, proba- 
bly, that results from the extreme completeness and 
activity of the combination, as a disk painted with 
all the primary colors and whirled rapidly, looks 
white. And the virtues of the book, the perfect dis- 
interestedness of Tom Pinch, the honest kindness of 
Mrs. Westlock and Mrs. Lupin, the steadfast faith 



ESTABLISHED FAME. 81 

of Mary Graham, the resolute helpful happiness of 
Mark Tapley, all keyed upon unselfishness, glow and 
sliine along the story with a Rembrandt-like strength 
that gives double blackness to the vice contrasted, 
with them. 

The place of selfishness in " Martin Chuzzlewit" 
is occupied by pride in " Dombey and Son ;" and al- 
though the evil quality is not exhibited in so many 
phases and persons, yet its power and its unhappy 
consequences are developed in the frightful strife 
between the ill-matched Dombey and his wife, with 
a gloomy intensity that teaches its lesson most effect- 
ively. And as in " Chuzzlewit," the loving disinter- 
estedness of some of the characters lends double 
force by its contrast to the selfishness of others, so 
in " Dombey," the self-forgetful love of Florence, of 
Harriet Carker, of Captain Cuttle, of Mr. Toots, and 
of Susan Nipper, whose sharp tongue and fearless 
deportment did not hinder her from being every 
whit as loving and as true as Florence herself— these 
sweet, bright characters most powerfully throw out 
in the picture the darkness and misery of hearts and 
lives like those of Mr. Dombey and Edith. 

" Dombey" cannot be ranked as high as " Chuz- 
zlewit," either in construction, humor, characteriza- 
tion, or variety. But the pathetic picture of little 
Paul is not matched nor approached by anything in 
the other story, nor by anything in all the other 
works of the author, save only Little Nell. The two 
children might have been spiritual twins, so alike 
were they in childish sweetness, in loveliness, in the 
sadness of early death. Yet there is no imitation in 



82 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Paul ; his shrewd, unconscious intellect, the vague, 
deep thoughtfulness of his little questionings and 
philosophies, appropriately mark him as the child of 
parents of great intellectual power, whatever their 
defects; while the preponderating affectionateness 
of Little Nell's character equally belongs to her as 
the grandchild of an old man very loving in his 
nature, whatever his weaknesses. 

The next of Mr. Dickens's great works was " The 
Personal History of David Copperfield the Younger." 
This story is supposed to contain paraphrases of ex- 
periences in Mr. Dickens's own life ; and it is reputed 
to have been that of all his works which the writer 
thought the best and loved the most. The passage 
already quoted from the Preface to "Dombey," 
shows with what a living interest Mr. Dickens at- 
tached himself to his stories ; passing into the set of 
circumstances and the company of the characters, 
as with a band of mingled friends and enemies, all 
active and alive, with whom he was dealing in 
reality. It is said, and is apparently an authentic 
report, that Hoffmann, the famous German writer of 
fantastic stories, was so sensitive and so subject to 
what may be called the objective imagination, that 
he habitually saw the fanciful beings of whom he 
wrote, as actual objects, sporting about him, moving 
among the articles of his table and upon the furni- 
ture of his room. This intense projecting of the 
conceptions of the brain was in fact unhealthy, and 
doubtless foreshadowed the nervous ailment which 
terminated Hoffmann's life. The very unusual health 
and dense elastic strength of muscle and brain fibre 



ESTABLISHED FAME. 83 

which belonged to Mr. Dickens prevented any of his 
notions from becoming delusions, or even illusions ; 
and yet he evidently lived among the creations of 
his brain with a sense of companionship and a feel- 
ing of affection far stronger than the mere vision in o- 
of the German phantast. The intensity of this 
feeling in regard to " Copperfield" is evident, not 
from its expression, but from the restraint of its ex- 
pression, in the Preface, where the author says : 

" I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away 
from this book, in the first sensations of having fin- 
ished it, to refer to it with the composure which this 
formal heading would seem to require. My interest 
in it is so recent and strong, and my mind is so di- 
vided between pleasure and regret — pleasure in the 
achievement of a long design, regret in the separa- 
tion from many companions — that I am in danger of 
wearying the reader, whom I love, with personal 
confidences and private emotions. Besides which, 
all that I could say of the story, to any purpose, I 
have endeavored to say in it. It would concern the 
reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the 
pen is laid down at the close of a two years' imagi- 
native task ; or how an author feels as if he were 
dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy 
world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain 
are going from him forever. Yet, I have nothing 
else to tell ; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which 
might be of less moment still), that no one can ever 
believe this narrative, in the reading, more than I 
have believed it in the writing." 

The criticisms of Mr. Dickens's successive novels 



84 CHARLES DICKENS. 

had by this time ceased to welcome him as a hopeful 
tyro, to instruct him as a well-meaning but ill-trained 
aspirant, or to anathenmumatize him (as some verbal 
humorist called the process) as an imitator ; and had 
become simply observations — most frequently by 
means of comparing the last book with the previous 
ones — upon a recognized master in literature. It is 
needless to exemplify this mode of treatment ; a 
single extract from Fraser'^s Magazine for December, 
1850, will show how promptly and definitely the 
autobiographic nature of "David Copperfield" was 
taken for granted by Englishmen : 

" This, the last, is, in our opinion, the best of all 
the author's fictions. The plot is better contrived, 
and the interest more sustained, than in any other. 
Here there is no sickly sentiment, no prolix descrip- 
tion, and scarcely a trace of exaggerated passion. 
The author's taste has become gradually more and 
more refined; his style has got to be more easy, 
graceful, and natural. The principal groups are de- 
lineated as carefully as ever; but instead of the 
elaborate Dutch painting to which we had been ac- 
customed in his backgrounds and accessories, we 
have now a single vigorous touch here and there, 
which is far more artistic and far more effective. 
His winds do not howl, nor his seas roar, through 
whole chapters, as formerly; he has become better 
acquainted with his readers, and ventures to leave 
more to their imagination. This is the first time 
that the hero has been made to tell his own story — 
a plan which generally insures something like epic 
unity for the tale. We have several reasons for sug- 



ESTABIJSHED FAME. 85 

gesting that here and there, under the name of Da- 
vid Copperfield, we have been favored with passages 
from the personal history, adventures, and experi- 
ences of Charles Dickens. Indeed, this conclusion 
is in a manner forced upon us by the peculiar pro- 
fessions selected for the ideal character, who is iirst 
a newspaper reporter and then a famous novelist. 
There is, moreover, an air of reality pervading the 
whole book, to a degree never attained in any of 
liis previous works, and which cannot be entirely 

attributed to the mere form of narration 

David Copperfield the Younger was born at Blun- 
derstone, near Yarmouth — there is really a village 
of that name. We do not know whether Charles 
Dickens was born there too ; at all events, the num- 
ber and minuteness of the local details indicate an 
intimate knowledge of, and fondness for, Yarmouth 
and its neighborhood." 

Whatever classification and gradation may be 
adopted for the works of Dickens, " Copperfield" 
must be reckoned at least among the best. Both the 
humorous and the pathetic parts of the book possess 
the high intensity, sustained power, psychological 
truthfulness and keeping, that characterize the best 
works of the master. The hero is as good as any 
hero, except that the appropriate modesty of a gen- 
tleman relating his experiences in the first person 
makes him necessarily more of a lay-figure than 
otherwise. At least this rule holds good until we 
come down to those wonderful personages, Charles 
O'Malley and Major Goliath O'Grady Gahagan. 
David Copperfield, however, is at least as good as 



86 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit. Agnes is 
as good a heroine as Florence Dombey or Mary Gra- 
ham or Madeline Bray or Kate Nickleby. Steer- 
forth and lieep and Littiraer are unsurpassed as 
gentlemanly and vulgar villains. Miss Trotwood is 
as much like Susan Nipper, a little matured by expe- 
rience, as it vv^as possible for Dickens to have two 
characters alike ; Barkis is at least as good as Buns- 
by ; the pathetic interest of the story of Emily is 
fully as deep as that of Alice in "Dombey ;" the ter- 
rors of the storm and shipwreck are as great as those 
of the death of Carker or of Quilp, if not equal to 
the tremendous, sustained, intense horror of the flight 
and death of the burglar Sikes ; and above all, the 
wondrous qualities of Wilkins Micawber are only 
equalled — they are not surpassed — by that otherwise 
incomparable creature, Sairey Gamp. 

In 1850, not at all worn out with his work, nor 
dismayed at his former ill-success in managing a 
newspaper, Mr. Dickens became the editor of 
" Household Words." This time there was no fail- 
ure ; the weekly literary paper became one of the 
most successful periodicals in the English language ; 
and it w^as evident that whatever his unfitness for 
mere political leader-writing, Mr. Dickens was 
abundantly competent to superintend a periodical 
with regularity and efiiciency ; to write, select, and 
edit with practical and workmanlike skill, and to 
select judiciously and conduct with kindness and 
decision the necessary staff of subordinates. In 
'^ 1857, owing to a disagreement with Bradbury & 
Evans, " Household Words" was discontinued, and 



ESTABLISHED FAME. 



87 



Mr. Dickens at once established All the Tear 
Bound instead, the publishers being his own old 
publishers, Messrs. Chapman & Hall. Mr. W. H. 
Wills, who had been employed with Dickens on the 
Daily Xews, and who was one of the originators of 
the London Pu7ich, was for a long time the chief 
assistant of Mr. Dickens in the periodical, having 
only been succeeded, a little before Mr. Dickens's 
death, by the eldest son of the latter. In House- 
hold Words and All the Year Round, first ap- 
peared, as "serials," "Hard Times," "A Tale of 
Two Cities," and "Great Expectations," and likewise 
the " Child's History of England," and the collec- 
tion of sketches of reminiscence, travel, and charac- 
ter, called " The Uncommercial Traveller." Be- 
sides these works, the Chief Editor bestowed an 
immense amount of time, thought, and labor on his 
periodical, for in w^hatever savored of detail or 
drudgery — in the mechanical part of what he was 
concerned with, Mr. Dickens was as laborious, thor- 
ough, workmanlike, and regular as though he had 
been nothing but a head book-keeper. The follow- 
ing particulars of his editorial habits are interesting. 
They are from a communication only a day or two 
after his death, in the Daily iVew?5, which he founded : 
"Although his intimate friend and partner, Mr. 
W. H. Wills, filled the post of acting editor until 
twelve or eighteen months ago (when he resigned 
the position \o Mr. Charles Dickens the younger), 
and saved Mr. Dickens much of the labor of selec- 
tion, we believe we are correct in stating that every 
article m Household ^Yords and All the Year Bound 



88 CHARLES DICKENS. 

passed under the conductor's eye, and that every 
proof was read and corrected by him. It was at one 
time the fashion to assume that ' conducted by 
Charles Dickens' meant little more than a sleeping 
partnership — as if Dickens could have been a sleep- 
ing partner in any undertaking under the sun; but 
those behind the scenes knew better, and the readers 
of All the Year Hound may assure themselves that 
every word in it was up to this date read before pub- 
lication by the great master whose name it bears. 
At this moment the ' Particulars for next number,' 
in the neat yet bold handwriting which it is impos- 
sible to mistake, hang by the side of the empty office 
desk." 

His editorial position, moreover, afforded him 
many opportunities of aiding authors of all kinds — 
and very gladly and generously he used them. The 
rule of contributing anonymously of course had its 
disagreeable side, and it prevented (for instance) 
Douglas Jerrold from writing for the weekly. " But 
the periodical is anonymous throughout," remon- 
strated Dickens one day, when he had been suggest- 
ing to Mr. Jerrold to write for it. "Yes," replied 
the caustic wit, opening a number and reading the 
title : " ' Conducted by Charles Dickens.' I see it is — 
^nononymous throughout." There was some reason 
for this, for Jerrold's name was worth money. But the 
practice was fair enough with most writers, and it is 
always easy enough to make one's name known after 
one has written something so good as to make peo- 
ple want to know it, as Mr. Dickens had himself 
proved. To young writers, the great novelist was 



ESTABLISHED FAME. 89 

as accessible and as kind as his exacting em- 
ployments rendered it possible for him to be; 
and very many are the papers to which he gave 
many a grace by the judicious touches of his mag- 
ical pen. 

The novels issued in these two periodicals do not 
call for any very particular criticism ; none of them 
are of the first rank among Mr. Dickens's works. 
The " Child's History of England" is a pleasantly 
written and sufficient compendium for its purpose. 
The miscellaneous sketches published together by 
the name of "The Uncommercial Traveller," im- 
press the reader a good deal as do the " American 
Notes" and the " Pictures from Italy." They are 
lively, full of observation and character ; we wonder 
at their unfailing vitality and general good nature, 
at the immense power of seeing and recording, at 
the endless succession of quaint, graphic, vivid 
touches. Yet, after all, it is the note-book of a nov- 
elist rather than the work of a traveller or writer of 
character-sketches as such, and we think what a 
mass of capital material this would have been for 
more novels. 

" Our Mutual Friend," the last of Mr. Dickens's 
completed novels, began to appear in May, 1864, and 
w^as finished in November, 1865. As had been the 
case about all his later novels — that is, about " Bleak 
House," and the others which appeared after " Da- 
vid Copperfield ;" it was thought by many that this 
work was of a second grade ; that it did not show 
so much force of thought, strength of representa- 
tion, brilliancy of fancy and of style — in short, not 



90 CHARLES DICKENS. 

SO much of any of its author's great qualities, as the 
previous novels. Yet if any distinction can be 
drawn between the two series of works, it is probably 
only in the quantity of gayety and humor in them. 
Whatever the power of the serious characters of the 
later novels as compared with the earlier, the mirth- 
ful element is far less frequent in the later. 

The " Christmas Stories," some of which have 
been almost as admired and as famous as the larger 
romances, were a series of five, published at Christ- 
mas of the years 1843-7. They need only be named, 
with their dates. They w^ere, " The Christmas Ca- 
rol," 1843; "The Chimes," 1844; " The Cricket on 
the Hearth," 1845; "The Battle of Life," 1846; 
and "The Haunted Man," 1847. Some critics have 
supposed that the last one or two of these series 
showed evidences of a fatigued mind. This may be 
true, in which case it was evidence of practical sense 
and self-knowledge to discontinue them. 

A number of other short stories were written by 
Mr. Dickens, among which may be named " Mugby 
Junction" — a sarcastic account of the impertinences 
and impositions of the railway servants and eating- 
house and other accommodations at Rugby, which 
concentrated such a roar of public laughter on the 
abuses as actually to whip the corporation into a re- 
form ; " Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions," " Mrs. Lirri- 
per's Lodgings," and " Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy." 

This completes an approximate sketch of Mr. 
Dickens's literary labors, properly so called. Their 
intellectual total is not measurable ; their mechanical 
total alone is a great one ; for it would include the 



ESTABLISHED FAME. 91 

editorial labor on the Dally N'ews^ that on BentUy's 
Miscellany^ that on the forty large octavo volumes 
of Household Words and All the Year Roiind^ and 
about sixty volumes of his own " Works," includ- 
ing the Novels, Tales, Sketches, Travels, Biography 
of Grimaldi, and History of England. 



CHAPTER HI. 

Deama — Readings — Second Visit to America — 
Last Days. 

Private friends of Mr. Dickens had long been 
familiar with his great fondness for acting, and his 
remarkable talent for it. It will be remembered that 
his first juvenile compositions were "certain trage- 
dies." He used to extremely enjoy all manner of 
private theatricals, in which he was a most efficient 
helper in every department, from the carpenter's up 
to the hero's, and he has for a considerable time been 
reputed the best amateur actor in England. In the 
year 1846 he made a first public appearance as an 
actor in " The Elder Brother," which was performed 
for Miss Kelly's benefit, and nothing in his appear- 
ance or performance gave the least indication that 
he was not a regular professional dramatist. One of 
his biographers, in the London News^ gives the fol- 
lowing reminiscences of the same period, and of the 
eager ready zeal with which Mr. Dickens made him- 
gelt a man-of-all-work in the cause : 

" Twenty-five years ago ' Every Man in his Hu- 
mor' was played at * Miss Kelly's Theatre,' now the 
* Royal Soho,' wuth Mr. Charles Dickens as Captain 
Bohadil^ Mr. Mark Lemon as Braiiiworm^ Mr. John 
Leech as Master Matthew^ Mr. Erank Stone as Jus- 



DRAMA, EEADINGS, ETC. 93 

tice Clement^ Mr. Gilbert a'Beckett as William^ Mr. 
Douglas Jerrold as Master Stephen^ Mr. Frederick 
Dickens as Edward Knoioell^ Mr. Alfred Dickens as 
Thomas CasJi^ and Mr. Dudley Costello as Doumright. 
All dead. Mr. John Forster, Mr. Horace Mayhew, 
Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, and Mr. Evans are the sole 
survivors of the men of letters whose brilliant ama- 
teur performance was the town's talk then ; and now 
that the life and soul of the enterprise — the man of 
business, the stage-manager, the ruling spirit — lies 
cold, men may well ask when we shall see such a con- 
junction of varied talent again. Charles Dickens was 
eminently dramatic in his genius and his tastes. 

"Some of his dearest and closest friends were 
actors, and from the time of Mr. Macready to that 
of Mr. Fechter, his chosen intimates included many 
of the chief lights of the British stage. As an am- 
ateur actor he himself was unsurpassed and unsur- 
passable. Those who remember the performances 
on behalf of the Guild of Literature and Art; those 
given privately at Tavistock House about a dozen 
years ago ; and those held on behalf of the Douglas 
Jerrold Memorial Fund, know that the dramatic 
readings which took the world by storm of late years 
were the ripened fruit of a. long and intense admira- 
tion for and leaning to the stage 

"Some of the most competent judges have de- 
clared that the English stage lost an ornament, 
which would have revived its brightest days, by 
Charles Dickens succeeding as an author and making 
literature his profession. But Mr. Dickens's earnest- 
ness was such that he not only took upon his own 



94 CHARLES DICKENS. 

shoulders the most arduous tasks connected with tho 
amateur performances for charitable objects with 
Avhich he so often associated himself, but superin- 
tended the minutest detail, and often worked with 
his own hands to insure what he held to be the 
necessary effect. 

" There are men living who remember his occupy- 
ing himself for a whole day with hammer and nails 
on the stage of Miss Kelly's Theatre, while it was 
matter for playful jocularity among brave spirits 
who have gone before, that Dickens had converted 
himself into an amateur check-taker, and sat in the 
receipt of custom with Arthur Smith all day long at 
the Gallery of Illustration, when the Jerrold per- 
formances were about to be given. This is not the 
place to speak of the intense and laborious care he 
bestowed upon the performances given at his Lon- 
don house, or of the days he devoted to the super- 
intendence of stage effects. The only place at which 
there was a chance of seeing Dickens at this time, 
said his intimates, was on his amateur stage, and 
there, absorbed in the subject of the hour, he would 
be found, resting one arm in the hand of the other, 
looking at the drops and cogitating upon their effect 
for the coming night, or working like any scene- 
shifter at the properties." 

In 1855 was performed at Tavistock House, in 
London, where Mr. Dickens was then residing, a 
striking two-act play entitled " The Light-House," 
written by Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mr. Dickens himself 
taking the part of Aaron Gurnock, the head light- 
keeper. The play and the acting excited so much 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 95 

curiosity in London society that after a good deal 
of urging it was repeated at a fashionable private 
residence, for the benefit of one of the organiza- 
tions to aid the British soldiers in the Crimea. The 
audience was extremely brilliant ; Mr. Collins, Mr. 
Mark Lemon, Mr. Dickens's sister-in-law Miss Ho- 
garth, and his daughter Miss Dickens, the artist Mr. 
Egg, and others, were the actors ; the scene was laid 
in the Eddystone Lighthouse, and the performance 
was such that it would have been highly successiiil 
as a professional one. Mr. Tom Taylor, the eminent 
critic, in an article in next morning's Times^ re- 
marked that — 

" The acting of Mr. Dickens and Mr. Lemon was 
most admirable, not only worthy of professional 
actors, but of a kind not to be found save among the 
rarest talents. Aaron, a rough, rugged son of Corn- 
wall, with the lines of misery deeply furrowed in his 
face, rendered more irritable than humble by re- 
morse, and even inclined to bully his way through 
his own fears, is elaborated by Mr. Dickens with 
wonderful fulness of detail, so that there is not an 
accent, a growl, or a scowl without its distinctive 
significance. In a word, it was a great individual 
creation of a kind that has not been exhibited be- 
fore." 

One of Mr. Dickens's biographers makes the odd 
anachronism of attributinsj the characters of Fascin 
and Sikes to an imitation or development by Mr. 
Dickens of hints furnished by Mr. Collins in this 
play. The imitation must in that case have been 
executed some eighteen years before the original; 



96 CHARLES DICKENS. 

and when Mr. Collins, the author of the original, 
was not more than thirteen years old. 

The Public Readings given by Mr. Dickens of 
late years, exhibited another phase of ability. Mr. 
Dickens's voice and other physical qualifications 
would probably not have given him much success if 
he had been a public reader and nothing else. But 
the immense familiarity of the public with his 
works, the singularly readable quality of these 
works, and the great dramatic ability of the author, 
rendered his appearance as a reader entirely satisfac- 
tory on the artistic side. Without one single artistic 
qualification, the public would have paid perhaps 
every cent that they did pay, to " see Dickens." For 
the very first condition of success as a lecturer or 
reader — except of course a reputation already 
gained specifically in those pursuits — is such a repu- 
tation gained in some other pursuit, that people will 
pay their admission fee to see the speaker. 

The number of people who would pay to see 
Dickens during the last twenty years is perhaps 
almost as great as of those who would pay to see 
Shakspeare or Scott. And when, having seen him, 
the presence of the man was found so kindly and 
magnetic ; when he read or recited, or rather re-im- 
provised (the absolute life of his oral renderings of 
his own books justifies the term) matter so familiar 
that his hearers could follow him almost as easily as 
if he recited the Bible ; when the pathetic and the 
ludicrous scenes sprang into such a vivid fulness of 
life the very voice, the A^ery man, who first made 
them, it is no wonder that the success of Mr. Dick- 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 97 

ens's public readings alone was equivalent to that of 
a whole successful life. His first appearance in this 
character was in London, April 13, 1861 ; and find- 
ing himself enthusiastically received, he read during 
the succeeding twelve months, in the principal cities 
of the United Kingdom. His second visit to Amer- 
ica, during the winter of 1867-8, was in fact a tour 
for the purpose of giving a series of these readings 
in this country. 

Just before leaving England, at a farewell dinner 
given to him in London, Mr. Dickens himself thus 
explained his proposed journey : 

"Since I was there before, a vast and entirely new 
generation has arisen in the United States. Since I 
was there most of the best known of my books have 
been written and published. The new generation 
and the books have come together, and have kept to- 
gether, until, at length, numbers of those who have 
so widely and constantly read rae, naturally desiring 
a little variety in the relationship between us, have 
expressed a strong wish that I should read myself. 
This wish, at fii-st conveyed to me tlirough public 
channels, has gradually become enforcedly an im- 
mense accumulation of letters from individuals and 
associations of individuals, all expressing in the 
same hearty, homely, cordial, unaffected way, a 
kind of personal interest in me — I had almost sa'd 
a kind of personal affection for me, which I am sure 
you would agree with me it would be dull insensibil- 
ity on my part not to prize. Little by little this 
pressure has become so great that although, as 
Charles Lamb says, my household gods strike a 
5 



98 CHAELES DICKENS. 

terribly deep root, I have torn them from their 
places, and this day week, at this hour, shall be upon 
the sea. You will readily conceive that I am in- 
spired by a national desire to see for myself the as- 
tonishing change and progress of a quarter of a cen- 
tury over them, to grasp the hands of many faith- 
ful friends whom I left there, to see the faces of the 
multitude of new friends upon whom I have never 
looked, and last, not least, to use my best endeavor 
to lay down a third cable of intercommunication 
and alliance between the Old World and the New. 
Twelve years ago, when. Heaven knows, I little 
thought I should ever be bound on the voyage 
which now lays before me, I wrote in that form of 
my writings which obtains by fir the most exten- 
sive circulation, these words of the American na- 
tion : * I know full well, whatever little motes my 
])eaming eyes may have descried in theirs, that 
they are a kind, large-hearted, generous, and great 
people.' In that faith. I am going to see them again ; 
in that faith I shall, please God, return from them in 
the Spring ; in that same faith to live and to die." 

The journey was made, and very few journeys 
have ever been made which gave so great a sum 
total of enjoyment. Mr. Dickens reached Boston 
November 19th, 1867; appeared for the first time 
before an American audience at the Tremont Tem- 
ple, Boston, on the evening of December 2d ; made 
a rapid circuit through a number of the principal 
cities of the Union, reading invariably to crowded 
and delighted audiences ; appeared for the last time 
at Steinway Hall, in New York, April 20th, 1868; 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 99 

and sailed for England on the 22d, carrying with 
him two hundred thousand dollars (gold), a sign 
which probably implied as much genuine enjoyment 
in the paying as any equal amount ever transferred. 
At the last reading in Stein way Hall, being recalled 
by the audience, he bade them farewell in the fol- 
lowing few words, full of the feeling of personal 
friendliness so visible throughout his works : 

"Ladies and Gentlemen: The shadow of one 
word has impended over me all this evening, but the 
time has at length come when the shadow must fall. 
It is a short word, but its weight is not measured by 
its length. Last Thursday evening, while I read the 
story of ' David Copperfield,' I felt that there was 
another meaning than usual in the words of old Mr. 
Peggotty, ' My future life lies over the sea.' And 
when T read from this book to-night (referring to the 
'Pickwick Papers'), I realized that I must shortly 
establish such an cdlhi as would satisfy even Mr. 
Weller senior. The relations set up in this place 
between us have been to me of the most satisfac- 
tory character. There has been on my part the 
most earnest attention to the work of preparation to 
entertain you, and on your part the kindest sym- 
pathy, which cannot be forgotten forever. I shall 
often recall you by the winter fire of my home, or 
in the pleasant summer of Old England — never as a 
public audience, but always as dear personal friends, 
and ever with the tenderest sympathy and affection. 
In bidding you a final farewell, I pray God bless 
us, every one, and God bless the land in which I 
leave you." 



100 CHARLES DICKENS. 

A number of the younger newspaper men of New 
York City organized a public dinner in honor of 
Mr. Dickens during this visit, which took place 
April 18th, and was an extremely pleasant occasion. 
Among the two hundred guests were some of the 
leading editors of the United States. Mr. Horace 
Greeley presided, and in the remarks with which he 
ushered in the speech-making, he began by acknowl- 
edging his obligations to the guest of the evening, 
whom he had, about thirty-four years before, ap- 
pointed an unpaid contributor to the iVew Yorker^ 
inserting, he said, in the very " first number" of it 
the sketch called " Passage in the Life of Mr. Wat- 
kins Tottle." The statement is not quite correct, 
by the by ; for Mr. Greeley says the sketch was, as 
first published, called "Delicate Intentions," which 
is not the case, and instead of being in the first 
number it was in the twenty-third. Mr. Greeley 
might have made another point which would have 
amused Dickens, — but he did not. He might have 
explained that in a subsequent number of the N^eio 
Yorker, on October 12th, ^839, he printed an indig- 
nant and very solemn article in favor of Interna- 
tional Copyright, ending with the fervent wish 
" that our National Legislature will, ere long, take 
into consideration the legal and weighty claims 
which are presented by foreign authors for the secu- 
rity of their rights in this country ; and that, actu- 
ated by those great principles of eternal justice 
which form the basis of International Right, our 
government will extend to them the protection to 
which they are justly entitled," And, he might have 



DKAMA, READINGS, ETC. 101 

continued, in illustration of this principle, a little 
afterward he inserted in the same New Yorker, 
*' Master Humphrey's Clock," without paying for it. 

Mr. Dickens's speech in reply to Mr. Greeley 
was a very good specimen of his abilities as an 
after-dinner speaker ; and as it was in some sense a 
representative speech, showing his sentiments about 
his brethren of the newspaper press, his deliberate 
and mature opinions about this country, and his 
earnest love of peace and harmony among the na- 
tions, and as his speeches are less familiar than his 
other utterances, it is here inserted in full. Mr. 
Dickens said (after having had to wait some minutes 
for the cheering to subside) : 

" Gentlemen : I cannot do better than to take my 
cue from your distinguished President, and refer in 
my first remarks to his remarks in connection with the 
old, natural association between you and me. When 
I received an invitation from a private association 
of working members of the Press of New York to 
dine with them to-day, I accepted that compliment 
in grateful remembrance of a calling that was once 
my own, and in loyal sympathy toward a brother- 
hood which, in spirit, I have never quitted. To the 
wholesome training of severe newspaper work, when 
I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first 
successes; and my sons will hereafter testify of 
their father that he was always steadily proud of that 
ladder by which he rose. If it were otherwise, I 
should have but a very poor opinion of their father, 
which, perhaps, upon the whole, I have not. Hence, 
gentlemen, under any circumstances, this company 



102 CHAELES DICKENS. 

would have been exceptionally interesting and grat- 
ifying to me. But whereas I supposed that, like the 
fairies' pavilion in the * Arabian Nights,' it would be 
but a mere handful, and I find it turn out, like the 
same elastic pavilion, capable of comprehending a 
multitude, so much the more proud am I of the 
honor of being your guest ; for you will readily be- 
lieve that the more widely representative of the 
Press in America my entertainers are, the more I 
must feel the good-will and the kindly sentiments 
toward me of that vast institution. Gentlemen, so 
much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, 
and I have, for upward of four hard winter months, 
so contended against what I have been sometimes 
quite admiringly assured was ' a true American ca- 
tarrh' — a possession which I have throughout highly 
appreciated, though I might have preferred to be 
naturalized by any other outward and visible means: 
I say, gentlemen, so much of my voice has lately been 
heard, that I might have been contented with troub- 
ling you no further from my present standing-pointy 
were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge 
myself, not only here but on every suitable occa- 
sion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high 
and grateful sense of my second reception in Amer- 
ica, and to bear my honest testimony to the national 
generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how 
astounded I have been by the amazing changes that 
I have seen around me on every side, changes moral, 
changes physical, changes in the amount of land 
subdued and cultivated, changes in the rise of vast 
new cities, changes in the growth of older cities 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 103 

almost out of recosfnition, chano^es in the s^rowth of 
the graces and amenities of life, changes in the 
Press, without whose advancement no advancement 
can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so 
arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years 
there have been no changes in me, and that I had 
nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to 
correct when I was here first. And, gentlemen, this 
brings me to a point on which I have, ever since I 
landed here last November, observed a strict silence, 
however tempted sometimes to break it, but in ref- 
erence to which I will, with your good leave, take 
you into my confidence now. Even the Press, be- 
ing human, may be sometimes mistaken or misin- 
formed, and I rather think that I have in one or two 
rare instances known its information to be not per- 
fectly accurate in reference to myself. Indeed, I 
have now and again been more surprised by printed 
news that I have read of myself, than by any other 
printed news that I have ever read in my present 
state of existence. Thus, the vigor and persever- 
ance with which I have for some months past been 
collecting materials for, and hammering away at, a 
new book on America has much astonished me ; see- 
ing that all that time it has been perfectly well known 
to my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic that 
I positively declared that no consideration on earth 
should induce me to write one. But what I have 
intended, what I have resolved upon (and this is 
the confidence I seek to place in you), is, on my re- 
turn to England, in my own English journal, man- 
fully, promptly, plainly, in my own person, to bear, 



104 CHAELES DICKENS. 

for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to 
the gigantic changes in this country as I have 
hinted at to-night. Also, to record that wherever I 
have been, in the smallest places equally with the 
largest, 1 have been received with unsurpassable po- 
liteness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, and con- 
sideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the 
privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my 
avocation here and the state of my hcaltlj. This tes- 
timony, so long as I live and so long as my descend- 
ants have any legal riglit in my books, I shall cause 
to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of 
those two books of mine in which I have referred to 
America. And this I will do and cause to be done, 
not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I re- 
gard it as an act of plain justice and honor. Gen- 
tlemen, the transition from my own feelings toward 
and interest in America to those of the mass of my 
countrymen, seems to be a natural one ; but whether 
or no, I make it with an express object. I was 
asked in this very city, about last Christmas time, 
whether an American was not at some disadvantage 
in England, as a foreigner ! The notion of an 
American's being regarded in England as a foreigner 
at all, of his ever being thought of or spoken of in 
that character, was so uncommonly incongruous and 
absurd to me, that my gravity was for the moment 
quite overpowered. As soon as it was restored, I 
said that for years and years past I hoped I had 
had as many American friends, and had received as 
many American visitors as almost any Englishman 
living, and that my unvarying experience, for- 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 105 

tified by theirs, was tliat it was enough in England 
to be an American to be received with the readiest 
respect and recognition anywhere. Thereupon, out 
of half-a-dozen people, suddenly spake out two, one 
an American gentleman wdth a cultivated taste for 
art, who, finding himself on a certain Sunday out- 
side the walls of a certain historical English castle, 
famous for its pictures, was refused admission there, 
according to the strict rule of the establishment on 
that day, but who on merely representing that he 
W'as an American gentleman, on his travels, had not 
only the picture gallery, but the whole castle placed at 
his immediate disposal. The other was a lady, who, 
being in London, and having a great desire to see a 
particular museum, was assured by the English 
family with whom she stayed that it was impossi- 
ble, because the place was closed for a week, and she 
had only three days there. Upon the lady's going 
to the museum, as she assured me, alone, self-intro- 
duced as an American lady, the gate flew open, as it 
were, magically. I am unwillingly bound to add 
that the lady certainly was young and extremely 
pretty. Still, the porter of that institution is of an 
obese habit, and, according to the best of my obser- 
vation of him, not very impressible. Now, gentle- 
men, I refer to these trifles as a collateral assurance 
to you that the Englishman who shall humbly 
strive, as I hope to do, to be in England as faithful 
to America as to England herself, has no previous 
conceptions to contend against. Points of diflerence 
there have been, points of diflerence there are, points 
of difl*erence there probably always w^ill be between the 
5* 



106 CHARLES DICKENS. 

two great peoples. But broadcast in England is sown 
the sentiment that those two peoples are essentially 
one, and that it rests with them jointly to nphold the 
irreat Ano:lo-Saxon race, to which our President has 
referred, and all its great achievements before the 
world. If I know anything of my countrymen, and 
they give me credit for knowing something, if I 
know anything of my countrymen, gentlemen, the 
English heart is stirred by the fluttering of those Stars 
and Stripes, as it is stirred by no other flag that flies 
except its own. If I know my countrymen, in any 
and every relation toward America, they begin, not 
as Sir Anthony Absolute recommended lovers to be- 
gin, with a 'little aversion,' but with a great liking 
and a profound respect ; and whatever the little sen- 
sitiveness of the moment, orthe little oflicial passion, or 
the litte oflicial policy now, or then, or here, or there, 
may be, take my word for it, that the first, enduring, 
great popular consideration in England is a generous 
construction of justice. Finally, gentlemen, and I say 
this subject to your correction, I do believe that from 
the great majority of honest minds on both sides, there 
cannot be absent the conviction that it would be 
better for this globe to be riven by an earthquake, 
fired by a comet, overrun by an iceberg, and aban- 
doned to the Arctic fox and bear, than that it should 
jDresent the spectacle of these two great nations, 
each of whom has, in its own way and hour, striven 
so hard and so successfully for freedom, ever again 
being arrayed the one against the other. Gentlemen, 
I cannot thank your President enough, or you enough, 
for your kind reception of my health and of my poor 



DEAMA, READINGS, ETC. 107 

remarks; but believe me, I do thank you with the 
utmost fervor of which ray soul is capable." 

The declarations in this sprightly and friendly lit- 
tle address which relate to the United States, w^ere 
advertised in some quarters as a " recantation" of 
l^is previous opinions or assertions. If the passage 
be carefully read it will be seen that there would be 
more reason in calling it a re-assertion of them. It 
is precisely this : a statement that since his first 
visit there have been great improvements and ad- 
vances of all kinds, together with the admission 
that the speaker was liable to error as other men 
are. This was certainly enough, for it w^as the 
truth. But it was very far indeed from an admis- 
sion that his previous views were wrong; this would 
have been an untruth. They were right, and Mr. 
Dickens thought so ; and he was the last man in the 
Avorld to retract his beliefs or contradict his own de- 
liberate recorded statements. 

There was a good deal of other good speaking at 
this dinner, notably by Hon. Henry J. Raymond — 
W'hose death a few months before that of Mr. Dick- 
ens was attended with closely similar symptoms — 
and by Mr. G. W. Curtis, the one a most competent 
sponsor to reply to the reporter and editor, and the 
other to the author. 

Having thus, as it w^ere, effected a satisfactory 
balance of accounts with America, the country be- 
ing reckoned satisfied with seeino- and hearinsj the 
great master whose books had been the deliglit of its 
households for a third of a centurj^, and in particu- 
lar with his New York declaration ; and testifying 



108 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

to that satisfaction through the money payment 
already mentioned; and the master himself being 
satisfied with both cash and kindness, he took his 
leave, being attended to the steamer by a number 
of personal friends, among them Mr. Fields, of the 
firm of Fields, Osgood & Co., Mr. Dickens's own 
authorized publishers in the United States. Mr. 
Fields' own social accomplishments, and agreeable 
manners, and friendly disposition, are in so many 
points like Mr. Dickens's own, that it is no wonder 
they were particularly fond of each other, and that 
their farewell was affectionate enough to seem a little 
too much so to some of the more "apathetic" of the 
Americans. The consequence was the following lit- 
tle squib in one of the New York dailies, which it 
will do no harm to reprint, as a smartish specimen 
of its kind : 

" ' KISS ME QUICK AND GO/ 

" BY ' ELDER.' 

" ' The leave-taking was very affecting. On parting from Mr. 
Dickens, Mr. Fields, his Boston publisher, took him by the hand, 
and bending toward him, kissed Mr. Dickens affectionately on the 
cheek.' — Evening paper. 

" The sun is sinking fast, Charles, 

And day will soon be o'er, 
When Sandy Hook is past, Charles, 

You'll see us ' nary more ;' 
One kiss before we part, Charles, 

Willie love my bosom tears. 
Perhaps it don't look smart, Charles, 

But who tlie Dickens cares ? 

Then ' kiss me quick and go,' Charles, 
Then * kiss me quick and go ;' 



DRAMA, HEADINGS, ETC. 109 

Oh, place your ruby lii)S to mine, 
Then ' kiss me quick and go,' 

" May winds blow gently 'round, Charles, 
And waves in frolic play ; 
No thunder's awful sound, Charles, 

Molest your happy way. 
We pray you not to grieve, Charles, 

And greet you with a cheer, 
While by your gracious leave, Charles, 
We launch a private tear. 
Then ' kiss me quick and go,' Charles, &c. 

" A thousand friendly throats, Charles, 
Bid you good-speed to-day, 
But don't Avrite any * Notes,' Charles, 

And say 'twas ' t'other way.' 
You once invoked your spleen, Charles, 

And struck us hard and sore ; 
But now you're not so green, Charles, 
About our Yankee shore. 

Then ' kiss me quick and go,' Charles, &c. 

" Now, place your hand in mine, Charles, 
And look me in the eye, 
With that sweet glance divine, Charles — 

Oh why that pensive sigh ? 
They'll soon the anchor weigh, Charles 

The wheels begin to turn ; 

I dare not longer stay, Charles, 

So home I go to mourn ! 

So, * kiss me quick and go,' Charles, 

So, * kiss me quick and go ;' 
Send all your books to Boston, Charles, 
Now, ' kiss me quick and go.' " 

The last line but one, it will be noticed, insinuates 
that Mr. Fields' kiss was dictated by financial con- 
siderations. This is really a wholly unnecessary iu- 



1 1 CHAELES DICKENS. 

uendo, as any personal friend of Mr. Fields knows 
very well. Besides, even if the ceremony in ques- 
tion had been for such a purpose, is there a publisher 
in New York who would not have kissed Mr. Dick- 
ens's cheek to secure the privilege of publishing his 
books with his personal authority ? 

Mr. Dickens's last work, " The Mystery of Edwin 
Drood," began to appear in April, 1870. Up to 
that time, his literary work after his return from 
America had consisted of little more than editorial 
labor on All the Year Round^ and his last compo- 
sition before " Edwin Drood'' was a sketch of his 
old friend and zealous admirer, Walter Savage 
Landor, for that periodical. 

His wonderful physical frame, dense, wiry, and 
enduring as its texture was, had, however, by this 
time begun to show signs of failing. While at Pres- 
ton, in Lancashire, during a tour of readings in the 
previous year, he had been so suddenly and imme- 
diately threatened with an apoplectic sti'oke, that his 
physician peremptorily ordered him to give up the 
attempt. It was a question of minutes; for the 
decision was made after the evening's audience 
had begun to assemble. He had either to stop 
or die. If, having stopped, he could have kept 
himself, so to speak, inert and empty-minded for 
a time, there is no reason, apparently, why he 
should not have survived for twenty years longer 
the constitutional crisis which was upon him ; for it 
was probably the physiological experience which 
occurs so frequently near his time of life as to have 
given occasion for the tradition of a " grand climac- 



DRAMxV, READINGS, ETC. Ill 

tcric" at the age of sixty-three, and wliich may have 
been in his case brought on a few years before its 
time by his incessant and immense drafts upon his 
vital capitaL It seems to have been impossible for 
him to be idle ; and although he had for some 
time been receiving further hints of what he was 
about, in the form of occasional attacks of neural- 
gia, sometimes very violent and painful, he worked 
away as resolutely as ever. Beginning his last 
novel, after five or six years' intermission since 
" Our Mutual Friend," he found that his chariot 
wheels drove heavily. His thoughts did not come 
so spontaneously nor so plenteously as usual. He 
was not so fully the master of his subject ; and 
already he had been a little vexing himself for hav- 
ing, as he supposed, told too much of the story 
within the first few numbers. He went steadily 
on with it, nevertheless ; and as far as he went, the 
whole of his old power was there except the fun. 
The feeling of "Edwin Drood"is grave throughout, 
its predominant tone being scarcely relieved by the 
satirical portions. There is not a hearty laugh in it, 
nothing gayer than a quiet smile. 

On Wednesday, June 8th, 1870, he wrote a few 
pages of the novel — the last. They completed 
about one-half of the book. On the same day he 
wrote a letter, which was perhaps his last. It was 
in reply to a gentleman who had written to him 
about the following word« in the tenth chapter of 
" Edwin Drood :" 

" would the Reverend Septimus submissively 

he led, like the highly popular lamb who has so long 



112 CHARLES DICKENS. 

and unresistingly been led to the slaughter, and 
there would he, unlike that lamb, bore nobody but 
himself." 

This passage had given offence to certain persons, 
who considered it an irreverent allusion. Mr. Dick- 
ens wrote in reply, as follows : 

" Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent, 
" Wednesday, the 8th June, 1870. 
" Dear Sir : — It would be quite inconceivable to 
me — but for your letter — that any reasonable reader 
could possibly attach a scriptural reference to a pas- 
sage in a book of mine, reproducing a much-abused 
social figure of speech, impressed into all sorts of ser- 
vice, on all sorts of inappropriate occasions, without 
the faintest connection of it with its original source. 
I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make 
the mistake. I have always striven in my writings 
to express veneration for the life and lessons of our 
Saviour ; because I feel it ; and because I re-wrote 
that history for my children — every one of whom 
knew it from having it repeated to them, long be- 
fore they could read, and almost as soon as they 
could speak. But I have never made proclamation 
of this from the house-tops. Faithfully yours, 

" Charles Dickens." 

On that same day at dinner, which was at his 
usual hour, six o'clock, his sister-in-law. Miss 
Georgine Hogarth, observing signs of distress in 
his face, remarked that he must be ill. He replied, 
"Oh no; I have only got a headache. I shall be 



DRAMA, READINGS, ETC. 113 

better presently." He now asked to have the win- 
dow shut; and ahnost immediately fell back in his 
chair and became insensible. He never recovered 
consciousness; but after remaining for twenty-four 
hours in the same condition, which the physicians 
who were promptly called in at once pronounced 
hopeless, he died, at a quarter past six on the even- 
ing of the next day, Thursday, June 9th, 1870. 

There is here a coincidence of date with a railroad 
accident in which he had a narrow escape five years 
before, and which took place June 9th, 1865. In 
a postscript to " Our Mutual Friend," the great 
novelist, closing his observations with a short refer- 
ence to this escape, marked with appropriate words, 
though without meaning to do so, the close of his 
series of completed romances. The last sentence of 
that postscript was : 

" I remember with devout thankfulness that I can 
never be much nearer parting company with my 
readers forever, than I was then, until there shall be 
written against my life the two words with which I 
have this day closed this book : — The End." 

He was buried on the 14th, in Westminster Abbey, 
not at his own request, but upon the suggestion of 
the authorities who control that famous sepulchre of 
famous men. It was found that this could be done 
without violating the injunctions in his will, that his 
funeral should be a private and quiet one. A spe- 
cial train carried the coffin and the small train of 
mourners to London. A hearse and three mourning 
coaches were all the procession to the Abbey. There 
was nothinc: whatever of the usual senseless under- 



114 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

taker's finery. Dean Stanley read the burial-service. 
The coffin was an oak coffin, with a brass plate, hav- 
ing upon it the inscription : 

CHARLES DICKENS, 

Born February 7th, 1812, 

Died June 9th, 1870. 

The few mourners threw flowers upon the coffin, 
and then departed, and the simple and quiet funeral 
was over. To comply with a general desire, the 
grave was allowed to remain open for a time, and tlie 
coffin was soon completely covered with flowers 
thrown upon it by those who came to visit it. 

That the extreme simplicity and privacy of these 
funeral ceremonies were felt to be the merest com- 
pliance with the wishes of the dead, appears plainly 
enough, not merely as having been requested in the 
will, but from his own practice. Having been on one 
occasion asked to help inaugurate a monument in 
Kensal Green Cemetery, he declined in the following 
courteous but very positive words, which will be 
strongly sympathized with by persons of delicacy : 

" My dear Mr. Ollier : I am very sensible of the 
feeling of the committee toward me, and I receive 
their invitation (conveyed through you) as a most 
acceptable mark of their consideration. But I have 
a very strong objection to speech-making beside 
graves. I do not expect or wish my feeling in this 
wise to guide other men ; still, it is so serious with 
me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a 
ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I 
must decline to officiate. 

" Faithfully, yours always, Charles Dickens. 
^'-Edmund Oilier^ Esq^ 



CHAPTER IV. 

Private Life — Traits and Anecdotes. 

Mr. Dickens's marriage, at the age of twenty-five, 
to Miss Hogarth, has been mentioned. Mr. and 
Mrs. Dickens have buried several children. Of six 
who survive him, one daughter is married to Mr. 
Charles A. Collins, a brother of Wilkie Collins the 
novelist ; another daughter is unmarried ; the eldest 
son, Charles Dickens, junior, according to his father's 
wish, succeeds him in the editorship of All the Year 
Moimd ; a second is living in Australia, a third is 
in the English navy, and a fourth is at the Univer- 
sity, where he is succeeding extremely well. 

It is supposed by some that the appearance of 
Mrs. Dickens's sister. Miss Hogarth, as one of the 
actors in Mr. Collins' play of " The Light-House," in 
1855, was in some way the cause of vexation to Mrs. 
Dickens, and thus the reason of the open quarrel 
which resulted in the separation of 1856. Others 
suppose this appearance to have been only the occa- 
sion of the disagreement in question. There are 
other scandals about the same cause, which it is 
unnecessary to examine. A flock of scandals always 
gathers around any such domestic misfortune, if the 
parties are widely known. There is reason to sup- 
pose, aside from the weight of Mr. Dickens's own 



116 CHAELES DICKENS. 

solemn assertions, that he and his wife were ex- 
tremely ill suited to each other. At any rate, after 
living together for more than twenty years, a sepa- 
ration was agreed upon, of which ]\Ir. Dickens him- 
self gives the following account. It was written for 
the express purpose of publication, and of thus quiet- 
ing the dust-cloud of gossip that was flying about: 

" Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, 

"London, W. C, Tuesday, May 28, 1858. 
" My dear Arthur : 

" You have not only my full permission to show 
this, but I beg you to show it to any one who wishes 
to do me right, or to any one who may have been 
misled into doing me wrong. 

"Kespectfully yours, C. D." 

" Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, 

" London, W. C, Tuesday, May 28, 1858. 
" To Arthur Smith, Esq. ; 

"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily to- 
gether for many years. Hardly any one w^ho has 
known us intimately can fail to have known that we 
are in all respects of character and temperament 
wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that 
no two people not vicious in themselves, ever were 
joined together who had a greater difticulty in under- 
standing one another, or who had less in common. 
An attached woman servant, more friend to both of 
us than a servant, who lived with us sixteen years, 
and is now married, and who was and still is in Mrs. 
Dickens's confidence and mine, and who had the 
closest familiar experience of this unhappiness in 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 117 

London, in the country, in France, in Italy, wher- 
ever we have been, year after year, month after 
month, week after week, day after day, will bear 
testimony to this. 

" Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between 
lis and a separation but Mrs. Dickens's sister, Geor- 
gine Hogarth. From the age of fifteen she has de- 
voted herself to our house and our children. She 
has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, 
protectress, adviser, and companion. In the manly 
consideration toward Mrs. Dickens wdiich I owe to 
my wife, I will only remark of her that the pecu- 
liarity of her character has thrown all the children 
on some one else. I do not know — I cannot by any 
stretch of fancy imagine what would have become 
of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with 
them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacri- 
ficed the best part of her youth and life to them. 

"She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and 
toiled, time and time again, to prevent separation 
between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has 
often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate 
care and devotion in the house — never more strongly 
than within the last twelve months. 

" For some years past Mrs. Dickens has been in 
the habit of representing to me that it would be 
better for her to go away and live apart ; that her 
always increasing estrangement made a mental dis- 
order, under which she sometimes labors, worse ; that 
she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as 
my wife, and that she would be far better away. I 
have uniformly replied that we must bear our mis- 



118 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

fortune, and fight the fight out to the end ; that the 
children were the first consideration, and that I 
feared they must bind us together ' in appearance.' 

*' At length, within these three weeks, it was sug- 
gested to me by Forster that even for their sakes it 
would be better to reconstruct and rearrange their 
unhappy home. I empowered him to treat with 
Mrs. Dickens, as the friend of both of us for one 
and twenty years. Mrs. Dickens wished to add, on 
her part, Mark Lemon, and did so. On Saturday 
last Lemon wrote to Forster that Mrs. Dickens 
* gratefully and thankfully accepted' the terms I 
proposed to her. Of the pecuniary part of them I 
will only say that I believe that they are as gener- 
ous as if Mrs. Dickens were a lady of distinction 
and I a man of fortune. The remaining parts of 
them are easily described — my eldest boy to live 
with Mrs. Dickens and take care of her ; my eldest 
girl to keep my house ; both my girls and all my 
children, but the eldest son, to live with me in the 
continued companionship of their Aunt Georgine, 
for whom they have all the tenderest affections that 
I have ever seen among young people, and who has 
a higher claim (as I have often declared, for many 
years) upon my affection, respect, and gratitude than 
any one in this world. 

"I hope that no one who may become acquainted 
with what I write hero can possibly be so cruel and 
unjust as to put any misconstruction on our separa- 
tion, so fiir. My elder children all understand it 
perfectly, and all accept it as inevitable. 

" There is not a shadow of doubt or concealment 



rPJVATE IJFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 119 

among us. My eldest son and I are one as to it 
all. 

*' Two wicked persons, who should have spoken 
very differently of me, in consideration of earnest 
respect and gratitude, have (as I am told, and, in- 
deed to my personal knowledge) coupled with this 
separation the name of a young lady for whom I 
have a great attachment and regard. I will not re- 
peat her name — I honor it too much. Upon my 
soul and honor, there is not on this earth a more vir- 
tuous and spotless creature than that young lady. 
I know her to be innocent and pure, and as good as 
my own dear daughters. 

" Further, I am quite sure that Mrs. Dickens, hav- 
ing received this assurance from me, must now be- 
lieve it in the respect I know her to have for me, 
and in the perfect confidence I know her in her 
better moments to repose in my truthfulness. 

" On this head, again, there is not a shadow of 
doubt or concealment between my children and me. 
All is open and plain among us, as though we were 
brothers and sisters. They are perfectly certain that 
I would not deceive them, and the confidence among 
us is without a fear." 

Notwithstanding this family unhappiness, Mr. 
Dickens was kind and affectionate in all the domes- 
tic and social relations. His acquisition and occu- 
pancy of his recent residence at Gad's Hill constitute 
to a pleasant story of youthful aspiration gratified. 
An English biographer of Dickens thus tells the 
story : 



120 CHARLES DICKENS. 

"Though not born at Rochester, Mr. Dickens 
spent some portion of his boyhood there, and was 
wont to tell how his father, the kite Mr. John Dickens, 
in the course of a country ramble, pointed out to him 
as a child the house at Gadshill-place, saying : 
* There, my boy, if you work and mind your book, 
you will perhaps one day live in a house like that.' 
This speech sunk deep, and in after years, and in the 
course of his many long pedestrian rambles through 
the lanes and roads of the pleasant Kentish country, 
Mr. Dickens came to regard this Gadshill house 
lovingly, and to wish himself its possessor. This 
seemed an impossibilit5^ The property was so held 
that there was no likelihood of its ever coming into 
market, and so Gadshill came to be alluded to jocu- 
larly as representing a fancy which was pleasant 
enough in dreamland, but would be never realized. 
Meanwhile the years rolled on, and Gadshill became 
almost forgotten. Then, a further lapse of time, 
and Mr. Dickens felt a strong wish to settle in the 
country, and determined to let Tavistock House. 
About this time, and by the strangest coincidences, 
his intimate friend and close ally, Mr. W. H. Wills, 
chanced to sit next to a lady at a London dinner 
party, who remarked in the course of conversation 
that a house and grounds had come into her posses- 
sion of which she wanted to dispose. The reader 
will guess the rest. The house was in Kent, was 
not far from Rochester, had this and that distin- 
guishing feature which made it like Gadshill and like 
no other place, and the upshot of Mr. Wills's din- 
ner table chit-chat with a lady whom he had never 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 121 

met before was, that Charles Dickens realized the 
dream of his youth, and became the possessor of 
Gadshill. It will now be sold, as well as the val- 
uable collection of original pictures which Mr. 
Dickens gathered together during his life, and many 
of which are illustrative of his works." 

The house at Gad's Hill is an old-fashioned one, 
plain and respectable and comfortable in appear- 
ance, a good deal like the roomy two-story brick 
house in a New England country town, of a well-to- 
do lawyer with a good taste for building and shrub- 
bery. It is two stories high, with dormer windows 
lighting a third tier of rooms in the attic. There is 
an observatory on the roof, and over the front door 
a well-proportioned porch with pillars, where Mr. 
Dickens used often to stand in the intervals of his 
work, resting himself with a quiet look along the 
road and the fields before him. A plain iron railing 
shuts the house off from the road. It is handsomely 
and comfortably furnished ; and the dining-room in 
particular was pleasantly set off with pictures and 
drawings, many of them gifts from his friends the 
artists, and illustrating scenes from his own writings. 
Among these was a portrait of Mr. Dickens him- 
self, by his friend Maclise. 

Gad's Hill is near Rochester, on the London side, 
and about twenty-five miles, or an hour's ride by 
rail, from London. At this, his favorite home, the 
successful author dispensed a wide, enjoj^ing, and 
enjoyable hospitality. Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, in 
Hearth and Hortie^ has given a very pleasant pic- 
ture of Mr. Dickens in his own home, froai which 
6 



122 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

the following passages are quoted. They paint him 
as a delightful companion and entertainer, as well as 
a kind friend and good neighbor, carrying with him 
a personal atmosphere of kind and humorous happi- 
ness, exactly such as might have been imagined 
from the most enjoyable of his novels : 

" Dinner was a gala-time with him ; but uncere- 
monious and careless of dress as he might be in the 
earlier hours of the day, he, in his latter years at 
least, kept by the old English ceremonial dress for 
dinner. His butler and servant were also habited 
conventionally; and the same notion of conventional 
requirement, it will be remembered, he observed 
always in his readings and appearance on public 
occasions. 

" But the laws of etiquette, however faithfully and 
constantly followed, did not sit easily on him ; and 
there is no portrait of him which to our mind is so 
agreeable as that which represents him in an old, 
loose, morning jacket, leaning against a column of 
his porch upon Gad's Hill, with his family grouped 
around him. 

"As dinner came to its close, the little grand-children 
tottled in — his 'wenerable' friends, as he delighted 
to call them — and with their advent came always a 
rollicking time of cheer. 

"After this, there may have been a lounge into the 
billiard-room, the master of the house passing his arm 
aft'ectionately around a daughter, and inviting her to a 
sight of a game between a Yankee and John Bull. 

"'Three-pence on the Yankee,' says Dickens. 
*Now then, Harry (to his son), do your best.' 



PRIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 123 

" ' Hurra for England !' he says at a good strike. 

" ' Now then for the Yankee ; and, remember — I've 
money up.' 

"And so he keeps a reigning joy about him — with 
those eyebrows of his arching comically at every 
mirthful sally. 

" Or, perhaps, it is not the billiard-room, but the 
velvety lawn, with its tufts of holly and Portugal 
laurel, to which he draws away his guests — in either 
case, intent most upon kindling smiles and* waken*v 
ing content." 

" One day, a visitor had sat up with him till the 
*wee small hours' of morning — an unusual circum- 
stance, for which Mr. Dickens proposed to compen- 
sate by a long sleep. But when the doctor rose and 
looked out upon the lawn, there was his host, en- 
gaged in directing the workmen who were rolling 
and adjusting the cricket -ground. 

*' He had forgotten, he said, that his gardener, with 
the gardener of the rector, had the promise of the 
ground for a game with some of their companions. 
It was not in good order, and he had risen betimes 
to put everything in trim for his friends of the 
cricket-match. 

" With this neighbor rector, by the by, he was on 
the best of terms ; and, notwithstanding his demo- 
cratic tendencies, had a strong yearning for the 
Established Church of England — not so much from 
love of its formalities, as from a kindly recognition 
of its ever-open doors to the feet of all the poor. • 

"The charity and kindliness that shone in his 
books belonged also to his life and every-day talk. 



124 CHARLES DICKENS. 

There was also a charming thoughfulness of others 
and self-abnegation in his familiar social intercourse. 
Upon the day preceding his final reading in 
New York, we had the pleasure of taking a twenty- 
'■ mile drive in his company. We sat opposite to him 

' in the carriage, and though t wings of paiu chased 
each other over his face, it was only by the greatest 
persuasion that we could mduce him to rest his 
bandaged and suffering foot uppn the seat beside us. 

,„--^Ve need hardly say to those who listened to his 
readings, with what zest and charm he told as^ory — 
how he made the characters of it come before you — 
how he summoned them all into presence, and made 
you a wondering partner in new and strange scenes. 
As a listener too, he was of the kindliest and most 
sympathetic ; listening with lip and eye and arched 
eyebrow — smacking the least touch of humor — 
going before your meaning and interpreting by swift 
expression of feature what your words were too slow 
to reveal. 

" Personally, we are most glad to have recollec- 
tion of him as a most genial and kindly man, with 
not the remotest show of self-consequence — with no 
sparkle of conceit — with no irritating condescension, 
but, throughout and in all, frank, warm, hearty, 
cheery, and companionable." 

Mr. Hawthorne, in his " English Note Book," 
records various reports about Dickens, whom he 
seems not to have met personally. It is a pity ; the 
observations of so penetrating and intuitive a prac- 
tical psychologist as the great American, upon so 
interesting a character as the great Englishman, 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 125 

would have been extremely valuable and interesting. 
Some one, in Hawthorne's presence, he says, "men- 
tioned his domestic tastes, — how he preferred home 
enjoyments to all others, and did not willingly go 

much into society. Mrs. , too, the other day 

told us of his taking on himself all possible trouble 
as regards his domestic affairs." 

Mr. Philp, of Washington, has recorded the fol- 
lowing very similar portraiture of Mr. Dickens's 
home and home life : 

" On arrival (half-past twelve), commenced witn^ 

* cider cup,' which had previously been ordered to 
be ready for us — delicious cooling drink — cider, soda- 
water, sherry, brandy, lemon-peel, sugar, and ice, 
flavored with an herb called burrage, all judiciously 
mixed. Lunch at one o'clock, completed by a liquor 
which Dickens said was ' peculiar to the house.' 
From two to half-past live we were engaged in a 
large open meadow at the back of the house, in the 
healthful and intellectual employment of playing 

* Aunt Sally' and rolling balls on the grass ; at half- 
past three, interval for 'cool brandy and water;' at 
half-past six o'clock we dined — young Charles 
Dickens, and a still younger Charles Dickens 
(making three generations), having arrived in the 
mean time — dinner faultless, wines irreproachable; 
nine to ten, billiards, ten to eleven music in the 
drawing-room ; eleven, ' hot and rebellious liquors,' 
delightfully compounded into punches ; twelve, to 
bed. 

"The house is a charming old mansion, a little 
modernized ; the lawn exquisitely beautiful, and 



126 CHARLES DICKENS. 

illuminated by thousands of scarlet geraniums ; the 
estate is covered with magnificent old trees, and 
several Cedars of Lebanon I have never seen 
equalled. In the midst of a small plantation, across 
the road opposite the house, approached by a tunnel 
from the lawn under the turnpike road, is a French 
chalet, sent to Dickens as a present in ninety-eight 
packing-cases ! Here Mr. Dickens does most of his 
writing, where he can be perfectly quiet and not 
disturbed by anybody. I need scarcely say that 
the house is crowded with fine pictures, original 
sketches for his books, choice engravings, etc. ; in 
fact, one might be amused for a month in looking 
over the objects of interest, which are numerous 
and beautiful. 

" Inside the hall are portions of the scenery, painted 
by Stanfield for the * Frozen Deep,' the play in 
which Dickens and others performed for the benefit 
of Douglas Jerrold's family, written by Wilkie 
Collins. Just as you enter, in a neat frame, written 
and illuminated by Owen Jones, is the following : 

" This House, 

" Gad's Hill Place, 

stands on the summit of Shakspeare's Gad's Hill, ever 

memorable for its association, in his noble fancy, with Sir 

John Falstaff. 

" ' But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning by four 
o'clock, early at Gad's Hill. There are pilgrims going to 
Can terbvny with rich offerings, and traders riding to London 
with flit purses. I have visors for all ; jou have horses for 
yourselves.' 

" In the dining-room hangs Frith's original picture 
of Dolly Varden, and Maclise's portrait of Dickens 



PKIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 127 

when a young man ; also Cattermole's wonderfVd 
drawings, illustrating some of Dickens's most touch- 
ing scenes ; besides several exquisite works by Marcus 
Stone (who illustrated 'Our Mutual Friend'), David 
jioberts. Callow, Stanfield, and others. My bed- 
room was the perfection of a sleeping apartment — 
the view across the Kentish hills, with a distant 
peep at the Thames, charming; the screen shutting 
off tlie dressing-room from the bedroom is covered 
with proof impressions, neatly framed, of the illus- 
trations to ' Our Mutual Friend,' and other works. 
In every room I found a table covered with writing 
materials, headed note paper and envelopes, cut 
quill pens, wax-matches, sealing-wax, and all scru- 
pulously neat and orderly. There are magnificent 
specimens of Newfoundland dogs on the grounds, 
such animals as Landseer would love to paint. One 
of them. Bumble, seems to be the favorite with 
Dickens. They are all named after characters in 
Dickens's works. Dickens at home seems to be per- 
petually jolly, and enters into the interests of games 
with all the ardor of a boy. Physically (as well as 
mentally) he is immensely strong, having quite re- 
gained his wonted health and strength. He is an 
immense walker, and never seems to be fatigued. 
He breakfasts at eight o'clock; immediately after 
answers all the letters received that morning, writes 
vmtil one o'clock, lunches, walks twelve miles (every 
day), dines at six, and passes the evening entertaining 
his numerous friends." 

The wonderful physical strength and endurance 
which Mr, Dickens possessed was undoubtedly an 



128 CHARLES DICKENS. 

indispensable condition of- his great mental produc- 
tiveness. His habitual performances and extraor- 
dinary speed and endurance as a pedestrian showed 
almost the abilities of a professional athlete. Mr. 
Hawthorne thus records a specimen of his enduring 
vitality, that reminds us of some of the stories about 
Seargeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi : 

" A gentleman, in instance of Mr. Dickens's un- 
weariability, said that during some theatrical per- 
formances in Liverpool he acted in play and farce, 
spent the rest of the night making speeches, feasting 
and drinking at table, and ended at seven o'clock in 
the morning by jumping leap-frog over the backs of 
the whole company." 

A writer in a London paper has drawn the follow- 
ing picturesque contrast between the personal ap- 
pearance and locomotive habits of Thackeray and 
Dickens : 

" The towering stature, the snowy locks, the glis- 
tening spectacles, the listless, slouching port, as that 
of a tired giant, of William Makepeace Thackeray, 
were familiar enough likewise in London a few years 
since, but, comparatively speaking, only to a select 
few. He belonged to Club-land, and was only to be 
seen sauntering there or in West End squares, or on 
his road to his beloved Kensington, or in the antique 
hall at Charterhouse on Founders' day, or on Eton 
bridge on the 4th of June, or sometimes, haply, on 
the top of a Richmond omnibus journeying to a brief 
furlough at Rose Cottage. Thackeray in Hounds- 
ditch, Thackeray in Bethnal Green or at Camden 
Town, would have appeared anomalous; as well 



PKIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 120 

could we picture Carlyle at Cremorne, or Tennyson 
at Garraway's ; but Charles Dickens, when in town, 
was ubiquitous. 

" He was to be met, by those who knew him, 
everywhere — and who did not know him ? Who had 
not heard him, and who had not seen his photograph 
in the shop windows? The omnibus conductors 
knew him, the street boys knew him ; and perhaps 
the locality where his recognition would have been 
least frequent — for all that he was a member of the 
Athenaeum Club— was Pall Mall. Elsewhere he 
would turn up in the oddest places, and in the most 
inclement of weather ; in Ratcliff Highway, on Hav- 
erstock-hill, on Camberwell-green, in Gray's Inn- 
lane, in the Wandsworth road, at Hammersmith 
Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New 
Town. A hansom whirled you by the Bell and 
Horns at Brompton, and there was Charles Dickens 
striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in 
the direction of North End, Fulham. The Metro- 
politan Railway sent you forth at Lisson Grove, and 
you met Charles Dickens plodding speedily toward 
the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly 
skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Cold- 
bath Fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters 
road at HoUoway, or bearing, under a steady press 
of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing 
the even tenor of his way up the Vauxhall Bridge 
road. He seemed to prefer the lengthy thorough- 
fares of our exterior boulevards to narrow and intri- 
cate streets. They offered, perhaps, a better oppor- 
tunity for fair and honest walking, and for the per- 



t30 CHAIILES DICKENS. 

formance of that self-appointed task of pedestrianisni 
wliich for so many years he had undertaken, and 
which well-nigh undeviatingly, and wherever he 
was — in London, at home at Gad's Hill, in France, in 
Italy, or in America — he performed to its last rood 
and furlong." 

Mr. Dickens's face is now almost as familiar as 
George Washington's. Wliat was perhaps his most 
striking feature, however, is one that a picture is 
least capable of representing — that which most of 
all expresses the character and life of the man — the 
vivid, penetrating brightness of his eyes. A con- 
temporary editor, in recording his impression of hira, 
says that, when he first saw him, he was " a hand- 
some young man, with piercing bright eyes and 
carefully-arranged hair." And again : " The last 
time I saw him was a few weeks since, wlien I had 
the pleasure of meeting him at dinner. To all out- 
ward appearance he then looked like a man who 
would live and work until he was fourscore. I was 
especially struck by the brilliancy and vivacity of 
his eyes. There seemed as much life and animation 
in them as in twenty ordinary pairs of eyes." 

This writer also refers to Mr. Dickens being often 
thought to have a " sailor-like" look. The same 
peculiarity is referred to by another writer, who also 
speaks of his harmless fancy for striking colors and 
decorative effect generally, in the matter of cos- 
tume : 

"His appearance in walking-dress in the street 
during his later years was decidedly ' odd,' and 
almost eccentric, being marked by strongly pro- 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 131 

nounced colors, and a cut of the garments which 
had somewhat of a sporting and somewhat of a 
tlieatrical guise. To those who did not know that 
he was Charles Dickens, he might have been some 
jDrosperous sea-captain home from a long voyage, 
some western senator on a tour in Europe, some 
country gentleman of Devon or of Yorkshire who 
now and then bred a colt or two, and won a cup, but 
never betted." 

The single flower or little bouquet at his button- 
hole was worn after a very general English habit ; 
but it attracted some attention in his public appear- 
ances in America, as did his watch-chains and so forth, 
and the generally "accented" style of his costume. 

His keen enjoyment of the society of friends was 
carried to an extent, in respect of convivial indul- 
gence, which has left upon his printed works the 
only feature that is really open to animadversion. 
The alcoholic coloring of " Pickwick" has already 
been mentioned. There is less of it in his other 
novels, and less and less as the series goes on ; but 
on the whole, and for the United States, it cannot 
be said that his works can be safely received as a 
guide in the matter of using alcoholic beverages. 
At the same time, in forming a judgment upon 
him in this respect, it must always be remembered 
that the general sentiment among the English is by 
no means as distinctly o})posed to the use of spiritu- 
ous drinks as among ourselves, and that the climatic 
conditions of England and the United States diifer 
so much that it is matter of physiological experience 
that about twice as much liquor of any kind can be 



132 CHv^ELES DICKENS. 

taken in England as in this country, for the same 
effect. This is not said, of course, as an argument 
either for or against total abstinence, but merely to 
give the elements of a fair verdict upon the nov- 
elist. 

The one or two specimens that have been given of 
Mr. Dickens's addresses are full of this genial, hearty, 
happy, kind feeling that Mr. Mitchell describes so 
well, and it appears as plainly in his correspondence. 
But it was so largely interfused throughout the 
whole nature of the man, that it could not but color 
all his deeds and words. With whomsoever he dealt 
in any way, he preferred to give enjoyment. This 
quality is very visible in the hearty letters of friend- 
ship, thanks, or praise which he was wont to send to 
his brother authors on occasion. When Mr. Blanch- 
ard had praised the " Christmas Carol," Mr. Dickens 
replied, with a delightful and unconcealed pleasure : 

" But I must thank you, because you have filled 
my heart up to the brim, and it is running over. 
You meant to give me great pleasure, my dear fellow, 
and you have done it. The tone of your elegant and 
fervent praise has touched me in the tenderest place. 
I cannot write about it ; and as to talking of it, I 
could no more do that than a dumb man. I have 
derived inexpressible gratification from what I know 
and feel was a labor of love on your part, and I can 
never forget it. When I think it likely that I may 
meet you ... I shall slip a Carol into my pocket, 
and ask you to put it among your books for my sake. 
You will never like it the less for having made it the 
means of so much happiness to me." 



riilVATE LIFE, TKAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 13M 

To Douglas Jerrold he wrote, speaking of Jer- 
rold's successful play, " Time Works Wonders," in 
a tone of thorough commendation that must have 
been welcome : 

" I am greatly struck by the whole idea of the 
piece. The elopement in the beginning, and the 
consequences that flow from it, and their delicate 
and masterly exposition, are of the freshest, truest, 
and most vigorous kind ; the characters, especially 
the governess, among the best I know ; and the wit 
and the wisdom of it are never asunder. I could 
almost find it in my heart to sit down and write you 
a long letter on the subject of this play ; but I won't. 
I will only thank you for it heartily, and add that I 
agree with you in thinking it incomparably the best 
of your dramatic writings." 

At subsequent times he wrote to the same labo- 
rious writer, whose circumstances and temperament 
made the doing so both a compliment and a kind- 
ness, on different occasions as follows. 

On receiving Jerrold's " Story of a Feather :" 

" I am truly proud of your remembrance, and 
have put the ' Story of a Feather' on a shelf (not an 
obscure one) where some other feathers are, which 
it shall help to show mankind which way the wind 
blows, long after loe know where the wind comes 
from. I am quite delighted to find that you have 
touched the latter part again, and touched it with 
such a delicate and tender hand. It is a wise and 
beautiful book. I am sure I may venture to say so 
to you, for nobody consulted it more regularly and 
earnestly than I did as it came out in Punch.'''' 



134 CHARLES DICKENS. 

In acknowledgment of a reference to the " Christ- 
mas Carol :" 

" It was very hearty and good of you, Jerrohl, to 
make that affectionate mention of the 'Carol' in 
Punch ; and, I assure you, it was not lost upon the 
distant object of your manly regard, but touched 
him as you wished and meant it should. I wish we 
had not lost so much time" [meaning, of course, "had 
employed more time"] " in improving our personal 
knowledge of each other. But I have so steadily 
read you, and so selfishly gratified myself in always 
expressing the admiration with which your gallant 
truths inspired me, that I must not call it lost time 
either." 

Of two passages in a letter to Jerrold in the year 
1846, the first is interesting for its views of "lit- 
erary friendship," the last as revealing a curious 
personal endov/ment of the writer : 

" My dear Jerrold: This day week I finished my 
little Christmas book (writing toward the close the 
exact words of a passage in your aff*ectionate letter 
received this morning : to wit, * After all, life has 
something serious in it'), and ran over here" [he was 
at Geneva] " for a week's rest. I cannot tell you 
how much true gratification I have had in your 
most hearty letter. F. told me that the same 
spirit breathed through a notice of ' Dombey' in 
your paper, and I have been saying since to K. and 
G. that there is no such good way of testing the 
worth of a literary friendship, as by comparing its 
influence on one's mind with any that literary ani- 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 135 

mosity can produce. Mr. W. will throw me into a 
violent fit of anger for the moment, it is true ; but 
his acts and deeds pass into the deatli of all bad 
things next day, and rot out of my memory ; 
whereas a generous sympathy, like yours, is ever 
present to me, ever fresh and new to me — always 
stimulatiniT, cheerful, and delightful. The pain of 
unjust malice is lost in an hour. The pleasure of a 
generous friendship is the steadiest joy in the world. 
What a glorious and comfortable, thing that is to 
think of! 

..." I have had great success again in magnet- 
ism. E., w^ho has been with us for a week or so, 
holds my magnetic powers in great veneration, and 
I really think they are, by some conjunction of 
chances, strong. 

" Let them, or something else, hold you to me by 
the heart. Ever, my dear Jerrold, 

" Affectionately your friend." 

In one of his letters to Jerrold, Mr. Dickens told 
a funny story which is worth inserting here, as a 
specimen of his quick-sightedness for the comic, and 
affluent ready narration : 

" I am somehow reminded of a good story I 
heard the other night from a man who was a witness 
of it and an actor in it. At a certain German town, 
last autumn, there was a tremendous furore about 
Jenny Lind, who, after driving the whole place 
mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning. The 
moment her carriage was outside the gates a party 
of rampant students, who had escorted it, rushed 



136 CHARLES DICKENS. 

back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bed- 
room, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room 
indicated to them, tore ap the sheets, and wore them 
in strips as decorations. An hour or two afterward 
a bald old gentleman of amiable appearance, an 
Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to 
breakfast at the table (Vhote^ and was observed to 
be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great 
terror whenever a student came near him. At last 
he said, in a low voice, to some people who were 
near him at the table, * You are English, gentlemen, 
I observe. Most extraordinary people these Ger- 
mans ! Students, as a body, raving mad, gentle- 
men !' ' O no,' said somebody else ; * excitable, but 
very good fellows, and very sensible.' * By G — , 
sir !' returned the old gentleman, still more dis- 
turbed, ' then there's something political in it, and 
I'm a marked man. I went out for a little walk this 
morning after shaving, and while I was gone' — he 
fell into a terrible perspiration as he told it — ' they 
burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are 
now patrolling the town In all directions with bits 
of 'em in their button-holes !' I needn't wind up by 
adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber." 
A few lines written by Mr. Dickens after the death 
of Mr. Jerrold will be read with interest, as describ- 
ing the pleasant side of a character usually reckoned 
(as Hawthorne reckoned him, and once told him 
to his face) " acrid ;" and moreover, as showing that 
both the friends possessed that genuine manliness of 
character that can pass over an estrangement and 
fully re-establish a friendship. Mr. Dickens says : 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 137 

" Few of his (Jerrold's) friends, I think, can have 
had more favorable opportunities of knowing him 
in his gentlest and most affectionate aspect than I 
have had. He was one of the gentlest and most 
affectionate of men. I remember very well that 
when I first saw him, in about the year 1835, when I 
went into his sick-room in Thistle Grove, Bromp- 
ton, and found him propped up in a great chair, 
bright eyed, and quick, and eager in spirit, but very 
lame in body, he gave me an impression of ten- 
derness. It never became dissociated from him. 
There was nothing cynical or cross in his heart, as 
I knew it. In the company of children and young 
people he was particularly happy, and showed to 
extraordinary advantage. He never was so gay, so 
sweet-tempered, so pleasing, and so pleased, as then. 
Among my own children I have observed this, many 
and many a time. When they and I came home 
from Italy, in 1845, your father went to Brus- 
sels to meet us, in company with our friends, Mr. 
Forster and Mr. Maclise. We all travelled together 
about Belgium for a little while, and all came home 
together. He was the delight of the children all 
the time, and they were his delight. He was in his 
most brilliant spirits, and I doubt if he were ever 
more humorous in his life. But the most enduring 
impression that he left upon us who are grown up — 
and we have all often spoken of it since — was, that 
Jerrold, in his amiable capacity of being easily 
pleased, in his freshness, in his good nature, in his 
cordiality, and in the unrestrained openness of his 
heart, had quite captivated us. 



138 CHARLES DICKENS. 

" Of his generosity I had a proof within two or 
three years, which saddens me to think of now. 
There had been an estrangement between us — not on 
any personal subject, and not involving any angry 
■w-ord — and a good many months had passed without 
my ever seeing him in the street, when it fell out that 
we dined each with his own separate party, in the 
Strangers' Room of a club. Our chairs were almost 
back to back, and I took mine after he was seated 
and at dinner. 1 said not a word (I am sorry to re- 
member), and did not look that way. Before we had 
sat so long, he openly wheeled his chair round, 
stretched out both his hands in a most engaging 
manner, and said aloud, with a bright and loving 
face that I can see as I write to you, * For God's 
sake, let us be friends again ! A life's not long 
enough for this !' " 

Mr. G. W. Curtis has told the foUow^ing closely 
similar story of a reconciliation between Dickens and 
another friend, Mr. Mark Lemon, though on a more 
melancholy occasion : 

" When Thackeray w^as buried, his friends, and 
among them the most noted of English authors, car- 
ried him to Kensal Green. There had been some 
estrangement between Dickens and Mark Lemon, 
and, as the coffin was lowered into its place, Dickens 
stood upon one side of the grave, and Lemon upon 
the other. As they raised their heads, their eyes 
met, and instinctively putting out their hands, they 
clasped them in forgiveness, and their quarrel was 
buried in the grave of Thackeray." 

In the letter which Dickens wrote in 1841, to Mr. 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 139 

Clarke, then editing the Knickerbocker Magazine^ 
to announce his intended visit to America, there is 
the same friendly warmth as in his notes to his every- 
day brethren at home, and a characteristic, ready, 
personal sympathy with the recent loss of his corre- 
spondent, whose brother had just died : 

"28th September, 1841. 
"My dear Sir: I condole with you from my heart 
on the loss you have sustained, and I feel proud of 
your permitting me to sympathize with your afflic- 
tion. It is a great satisfaction to me to have been 
addressed under similar circumstances by many of 
your countrymen since the Old Curiosity Shop 
came to a close. Some simple and honest hearts in 
the remote wilds of America, have written me letters 
on the loss of children, so numbering my little book 
or rather heroine, with their household gods ; and 
so pouring out their trials and sources of comfort in 
them before me as a friend, that I have been inex- 
pressibly moved, and am whenever I think of them, 
I do assure you. You have already all the comfort 
I could lay before you ; all I hope, that the affection- 
ate spirit of your brother, now in happiness, can shed 

into your soul On the 4th of next January, 

if it please God, I am coming with my wife on a 
three or four months' visit to America. The British 
and North American packet will bring me, I hope, 
to Boston, and enable me in the third week of the 
nev/ year to set my foot upon the soil I have trod- 
den in my day-dreams many times, and whose sons 
(and daughters) I yearn to know and be among. I 



140 CHAELES DICKENS. 

hope you are surprised, and I hope, not unpleasantly 
Faithfully yours, ., Charles Dickens." 

Another American author, Cliarles Lanman, Esq., 
has published the following interesting reminiscences 
of the friendship between Mr. Dickens and a third 
American author, Washington Irving. There could 
hardly have been any other than an affectionate 
and thoroughly hearty admiration between two such 
good and genial natures as those of Dickens and 
Irving ; and Mr. Lanman's narrative is graceful and 
easy; and Mr. Dickens's own recollection of the after- 
noon over the " enchanted julep," is delightfully hu- 
morsome and pleasant, and in respect of feeling 
description and composition, it is noticeable that it 
might have been written by Irving about Dickens 
exactly as well as by Dickens about Irving. This 
paper of Mr. Lanman's was first printed in the Wash- 
ington Chronicle : 

" The intercourse between them commenced in 
1841, when Mr. Irving was in his fifty-eighth year, 
and Mr. Dickens had attained precisely half that 
number of years — twenty-nine. The American took 
the lead and wrote a letter expressing his heartfelt 
delight with the writings of the Englishman and his 
yearnings toward him. The reply was minute, im- 
petuously kind, and eminently characteristic. 'There 
is no man in the world,' said Mr. Dickens, * who 
would have given me the heartfelt pleasure you 

have There is no living writer, and there 

are very few among the dead, whose approbation I 
should feel so proud to earn. And with everything 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 141 

you have written upon my shelves, and in my 
thoughts and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly 
and truly say so. If you could know how earnestly 
I write this you would be glad to read it, as I hope 
you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the 
hand I autobiographically hold out to you over the 

broad Atlantic I have been so accustomed 

to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest 
thoughts and with my leisure hours, that I rush at 
once into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were 
naturally, and by the very laws of gravity, into 

your open arms I cannot thank you enough 

for your cordial and generous praise, or tell you what 
deep and lasting gratification it has given me.' 

"In the winter of 1842, and while the literary 
public of New York were congratulating Mr. Irving 
on his appointment as Minister to Spain, the tide of 
excitement suddenly turned toward Mr. Dickens, 
who just then arrived in the city of Boston. Then 
it was that the two lions first met face to face ; and 
for a few weeks, at Sunnyside, and in the delightful 
literary society which was a striking feature of New 
York life at that time, they saw as much of each 
other as circumstances would allow. Professor C. 
C. Felton, in his remarks on the death of Mr. Irving, 
before the Historical Society of Massachusetts, gave 
us some interesting recollections of this winter in 
New York. Among other things, he said: * I passed 
much of the time with Mr. Irving and Mr. Dickens; 
and it was delightful to witness the cordial inter- 
course of the young man, in the flush and glory of 
his fervid genius, and his elder compeer, then in the 



142 CHAELES DICKENS. 

assured possession of immortal renown. Dickens 
said in his frank, hearty manner, that from his child- 
hood he had known the works of Irving ; and that 
before he thought of coming to this country, he had 
received a letter from him, expressing the delight he 
felt in reading the story of Little Nell.' " 

*' But the crowning event of the winter in question 
was the great dinner given to Mr. Dickens by his 
admirers at the old City Hotel. I was a mere boy 
at the time, a Pearl-street clerk, but through the 
kindness of certain friends the honor was granted 
to me of taking a look from a side-door at the august 
array of gifted authors before they were summoned 
to the sumptuous table. It was but a mere glimpse 
that I enjoyed; but while Mi*. Irving, as presiding 
host, was sacrificing his sensitive nature for the 
gratification of his friend, and was, by breaking 
down in his speech of welcome, committing the only 
faihire of his life, I retired to the quiet of my attic 
room, and spent nearly the whole of that night with 
Little Nell, the Broken Heart, and Marco Bozzaris, 
and drinking in the beauty and the comforting phi- 
losophy of Thanatopsis, all of them the matchless 
creations of those persons it had been my privilege 
to see. The little speech which Mr. Dickens deliv- 
ered on that occasion was happy in the extreme, 
proving not only that he was familiar with the writ- 
ings of Mr. Irving, but that he placed the highest 
value upon them ; and before taking his seat he 
submitted the following toast : ' The Literature of 
America : She well knows how to honor her own 
literature, to do honor to that of other lauds, when 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 143 

she chooses Washington Irving as her representative 
in the country of Cervantes.' " 

Soon after the New York dinner, business called 
Mr. Irving to Washington, and Mr. Dickens made 
his arrangements to be there at the same time. At 
that place they renewed their friendly intercourse, 
laughed together at the follies of the politicians, 
enjoyed the companionship of the great triumvirs — 
Webster, Clay, and Calhoun — and were of course 
victimized at the President's receptions. On one 
occasion the honors were certainly divided between 
the two authors ; and while we know that Mr. 
Dickens had no reason to complain of any want 
of attention on the part of the people, it is 
pleasant to read his comments upon the conduct of 
the assembled company toward Mr. Irving. " I sin- 
cerely believe," said he in his American Notes, "that 
in all the madness of American politics few public 
men would have been so earnestly, devotedly, and 
affectionately caressed as this most charming writer ; 
and I have seldom respected a public assembly more 
than I did this eager throng, when I saw them turn- 
ing with one mind from noisy orators and officers of 
State, and flocking, with a generous and honest im- 
pulse, around the man of quiet pursuits; proud in 
his promotion as reflected back upon their country, 
and gi'ateful to him with their whole hearts for the 
store of graceful fancies he had poured out among 
them," From Washington, Mr. Dickens went upon 
a trip to Richmond, and on his return he made a 
doubtful appointment to meet Mr. Irving in Balti- 
more, and to that meeting I shall presently recur. 



144 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

In the mean time I must quote a single paragraph 
from a letter that he wrote as a reminder to Mr. 
Irving : ' What pleasure I have had in seeing and 
talking with you I will not attempt to say. I shall 
never forget it as long as I live. What vnould I 
give if we could have but a quiet week together ! 
Spain is a lazy place, and its climate an indolent one. 
But if you ever have leisure under its sunny skies to 
think of a man who loves you and holds communion 
with your spirit oftener, perhaps, than any other 
person alive — leisure from listlessness I mean — and 
will write to me in London, you will give me an 
inexpressible amount of pleasure.' 

" In 1853 it was my privilege to spend a day with 
Mr. Irving during his last visit to Washington, and 
in an account of it which I published in Once a 
Week, in London, occurs the following : ' He touched 
upon literary men generally, and a bit of criticism 
on Thackeray seemed to me full of meaning. He 
liked the novelist as a lecturer and a man, and his 
books were capital. Of his novels he liked " Pen- 
dennis" most ; " Vanity Fair" was full oi' talent, 
but many passages' hurt his feelings ; " Esmond" he 
thought a queer affair, but deeply interesting. 
Thackeray had quite as great genius as Dickens, 
but Dickens was genial and warm^ and that suited 
him.'' 

" And now comes a letter addressed to me by 
Mr. Dickens, during his last visit to this country, 
and as introductory to which the preceding para- 
graphs have been written. In view of the allusion 
to myself, I must plead the saying that ' it is some- 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 145 

times almost excusable to commit a little sin for 
the purpose of securing a greater good :' 

" 'Washington, February 5, 1868. 

" ' My dear Sir : Allow me to thank you most 
cordially for your kind letter and for its accompany- 
ing books. I have a particular love for books of 
travel, and shall wander into the " Wilds of Amer- 
ica" with great interest. I have also received your 
charming sketch with great pleasure and admiration. 
Let me thank you for it heartily. As a beautiful 
suggestion of nature associated with this country, it 
shall have a quiet place on the walls of my house 
as long as I live. 

" ' Your reference to my dear friend, Washington 
Irving, renews the vivid impressions reawakened in 
my mind at Baltimore the other day. I saw his fine 
face for the last time in that city. He came there 
from New York, to pass a day or two with me be- 
fore I went westward, and they were made among 
the most memorable of my life by his delightful 
fancy and genial humor. Some unknown admirer 
of his books and mine sent to the hotel a most enor- 
mous mint julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, 
one on either side of it, with great solemnity (it 
filled a respectable-sized round table), but the solem- 
nity was of very short duration. It was quite an 
enchanted julep, and carried us among innumerable 
people and places that we both knew. The julep 
lield out far into the night, and my memory never 
saw him afterward otherwise than as bending over 
it with his straw with an attempted gravity (after 

7 



146 CHARLES DICKENS. 

some anecdote involving some wonderfully droll and 
delicate observation of character), and then, as his 
eye caught mine, melting into that captivating laugh 
of his, which was the brightest and best I have ever 
heard. 

" ' Dear Sir, with many thanks, faithfully yours, 

" ' Charles Dickens. 
" ' Chaeles Lakman, Esq., Georgetown, D. C" 

Dickens's friendship was by no means confined to 
professions. He was ready and generous with labor, 
influence, and money, according to his ability, for 
every one that needed help. After the loss of the 
steamer President in 1841, it was ascertained that 
the brilliant Irish comedian Tyrone Power, who was 
lost in her, had left a wife and family in need. A 
gentleman who knew the facts wrote to Mr. Dickens^ 
and suggested the propriety of a public subscription 
for their assistance. Dickens immediately responded, 
enclosed a check for £100, wrote a letter to the Times 
newspaper — one of his characteristic letters — offered 
to receive any subscriptions that the public might 
forward him, and got Mr. Delane, the managing 
editor of the paper, to insert one of his powerful 
editorials in support of the appeal ; and by the co- 
operation of the literary world of London, a suffi- 
cient sum Avas in less than a month raised to place 
poor Power's wife and family in comfortable circum- 
stances. 

On one occasion, Mr. Dickens's personal friend, 
the eminent actor Fechter, had been appearing at 
the Lyceum theatre with a brilliant result; every 



PEIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 147 

evening his talent filled that house, which was only 
too small ; but, as not unfrequently happens in the- 
atrical experience, a full house left him with an 
empty cash-box. One evening he had a discussion 
with his manager, who incontestably proved to 
Fechter that he was some £3,000 in the manager's 
debt. Fechter had been under the impression that 
there was a balance of at least twice that amount on 
his side; but artists are in this like great lords— their 
men of business often trouble them with these un- 
pleasant surprises. He went out rather angry and 
not a little embarrassed, for it was not at all to his 
taste to remain in this man's debt. 

" How are you, Fechter, my dear fellow ?" It was 
the cheery voice of Dickens, as he turned the corner 
of Covent Garden. Fechter told him with some 
feeling how he was situated. Dickens expressed no 
compassion, but shook hands and wished him good- 
night. 

Fechter thought it hard, but such is friendshij^. 
Only the next morning the manager looked him up. 
"The matter was not so pressing as all that, my 
dear sir," said he. 

" What do you mean ?" 

" Why, about that £3,000. Charles Dickens came 
and handed me the cash on your behalf at twelve 
o'clock last night." 

One of his English eulogists thus discusses his 
friendship for artists : 

" It will be remembered that on the occasion of 
the last Academy dinner, Mr. Dickens alluded in 
most affecting terms to the intimate friendsliip it 



148 CHARLES DICKENS. 

had been his happiness to maintain with Academi- 
cians, now no more. Choice works of many of these 
great artists hang on the walls of Gad's Hill. The 
list will be published shortly, and lovers of good 
pictures, admirers of the great writer who has gone, 
and men who love to have priceless associations 
environing their works of art, will be interested in 
the catalogue which is about to come forth. The 
anecdotes concerning Dickens's personal virtues, and 
the circumstances under which pictures were painted 
for him, so crowTl upon us as we write, that the 
chief difficulty is to avoid saying too much. Will 
a great living painter of English manners, Mr. W. P. 
Frith, forgive an allusion to the early days when the 
success of his admirable picture of Dolly Varden led 
Charles Dickens to call upon him, and after express- 
ing the warmest thanks for the feeling and apprecia- 
tion which the artist's handiwork displayed, to give 
him a commission for other subjects, to be selected 
from the works of ' Boz ?' This was before Mr. 
Frith had won academical honors, before his name 
had a world-wide reputation ; but Dickens wanted 
on canvas, and in hues which should live, the young 
artist's conception of the imaginary people with 
whose characteristics England was ringing ; for 
Dolly Varden had proved her limner's capacity in 
the eyes of the man best qualified to judge. Dick- 
ens's hearty approval of the pictures when painted, 
his personal introduction of himself to thank the 
artist, and his check, with the well-known signature, 
the ' C rather like a ' G,' and the elaborate flourish 
beneath it, exactly as it is given outside the last edi- 



PRIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 149 

tion of his works, are, we venture to say, like things 
of yesterday to Mr. Frith. Does the reader remem- 
ber the touching obituary notice of Stanfield which 
Dickens penned, the affectionate appreciation of the 
delica,te shades of the great maritime artist's char- 
acter which that notice evinced, and the noble pero- 
ration with which it closed? The earnest wish dis- 
played by the Queen to confer upon Dickens some 
title of honor, and the womanly refinement shown 
by Her Majesty in seeking to make that honor one 
which he could accept without derogating from his 
social principles, gives his parting words on Stanfield 
a not unkindly significance. It was after enumer- 
ating the artist's many claims to public distinction, 
after specifying several of his works by name, and 
after pointing to the recognition he would have 
received had he belonged to a foreign State, that 
Dickens said: 'It is superfluous to add that he died 
Mr. Stanfield — he was an Englishman. In the hall 
of the house at Gad's Hill Place hang some of Stan- 
field's masterpieces, to be dispersed with the works 
of Frith, of Egg, of Maclise, and of half a score 
other masters, equally well known, when the auc- 
tioneer's hammer falls." 

The friendship between Dickens and Thackeray 
was a very genuine one ; the two great authors sin- 
cerely admired and enjoyed each other's works. 
When Thackeray died, like Dickens, suddenly, and 
like him in the middle of a novel upon which he was 
expending unusual labor — Dickens published a brief 
memorial of him, in which he said : 

" But on the table before me there lies all that he 



150 CHARLES DICKENS. 

had written of his latest and best story. That it 
would be very sad to any one — that it is inexpress- 
ibly sad to the writer — in its evidences of matured 
designs never to be accomplished, of intentions 
begun to be executed and destined never to be 
completed, of careful preparation for long roads of 
thought that he was never to traverse, and for 
shining goals that he was never to reach, will be 
readily believed. The pain, however, that I have 
felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the con- 
viction that he was in the healthiest vigor of his 
powers when he wrought on this last labor. In 
respect of earnest feeling, farseeing purpose, charac- 
ter, incident, and a certain loving picturesqueness 
blending the whole, I believe it to be much the best 
of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that 
he had become strangely attached to it, and that he 
bestowed great pains upon it, I trace in almost every 
page. It contains one picture which must have 
caused him extreme distress, and which is a master- 
piece. There are two children in it, touched with a 
hand as loving and tender as ever a father caressed 
his little child with. There is some young love as 
pure, and innocent, and pretty as the truth. And it 
is very remarkable that, by reason of the singular 
construction of the story, more than one main incident 
usually belonging to the end of such a fiction is antici- 
pated in the beginning, and thus there is an approach 
to completeness in the fragment as to the satisfaction 
of the reader's mind concerning the most interesting 
persons, which could hardly have been better attained 
if the writer's breaking: ofi:* had been foreseen. 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 151 

"The last line he wrote, and the last proof he cor- 
rected, are among these papers through which I 
have so sorrowfully made my way. The condition 
of the little pages of manuscript, where death 
stopped his hand, shows that he had carried them 
about, and often taken them out of his pocket here 
and there for patient revision and interlineation. 
The last words he corrected in print vrere, ' And my 
heart throbbed with exquisite bliss.' God grant 
that on that Christmas-eve when he laid his head 
back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had 
been wont to do when very weary, some conscious- 
ness of duty done and Christian hope throughout life 
humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so 
to throb when he passed away to his Redeemer's 
rest !" 

Mr. Thackeray had before this more than once 
appeared in print as the eulogist or defender of Mr. 
Dickens. On one occasion he graphically described 
a portait of his friend, his double power as draughts- 
man and writer giving unusual distinctness to the 
picture. 

It is only a fragment from Thackeray's papers, but 
it shows the appreciation which he had for his brother 
in letters : 

"Look at the portrait of Mr. Dickens, well ar- 
ranged as a picture, good in color, and light, and 
shadow, and as a likeness perfectly amazing ; a 
looking-glass could not render a better fac-simile. 
Here we have the real iadentical man Dickens ; the 
artist must have understood the inward Boz as well 
as the outward before he made this admirable rep- 



152 CHARLES DICKENS, 

resentation of him. What cheerful intelligence 
there is about the man's eyes and large forehead! 
The mouth is too large and full, too eager and active, 
perhaps ; the smile is very sweet and generous. If 
M. de Balzac, that voluminous physiognomist, could 
examine the head, he would, no doubt, interpret 
every line and wrinkle in it ; the nose firm and well 
placed, the nostrils wide and full, as are the nostrils 
of all men of genius (this is M. de Balzac's maxim). 
The past and future, says Jean Paul, are written in 
every countenance. I think we may promise our- 
selves a brilliant future from this one. There seems 
no flagging as yet in it, no sense of fatigue or con- 
sciousness of decaying power. Long mayest thou, 
Boz ! reign over thy comic kingdom; long may we 
pay tribute, whether of threepence weekly, or of a 
shilling monthly, it matters not. Mighty Prince ! at 
thy imperial feet, Titmarsh, humblest of thy serv- 
ants, offers his vows of loyalty, and his humble 
tribute of praise." 

Mr. Thackeray's praise of Mr. Dickens, in his 
"Lectures on Charity and Humor," has been printed 
often, and here it is again. How humorous the 
critic's confession of his own little girl's preference 
for the other writer's books ! and how genuine and 
unmistakable is the pleasure with which the praise is 
given ! — 

" As for the charities of Mr. Dickens, the multiplied 
kindnesses which he has conferred upon us all, upon 
our children, upon people educated and uneducated, 
upon the myriads here and at home, who speak our 
common tongue ; have not you, have not I, all of us, 



AND ANECDOTES. 15? 

reason to be thankful to this kind friend, who soothed 
and charmed so many hours ; brought pleasure and 
sweet laughter to so many homes; made such mul- 
titudes of children happy ; endowed us with such a 
sweet store of gracious thoughts, fair fancies, soft 
sympathies, hearty enjoyments? There are crea- 
tions of Mr. Dickens's which seem to me to rank as 
personal benefits ; figures so delightful, that one feels 
happier and better for knowing them, as one does for 
being brought into the society of very good men 

and women Was there ever a better charity 

sermon preached in the world than Dickens's 
'Cliristmas Carol?' I believe it occasioned immense 
hospitality throughout England ; was the means of 
lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas- 
time; caused a wonderful outpouring of Christmas 
good feeling ; of Christmas punch-brewing ; an 
awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys, and roasting 
and basting of Christmas beef. As for this man's 
love of children, that amiable organ at the back of 
his honest head must be perfectly monstrous. All 
children ought to love him. I know tw^o that do, 
and read his books ten times for once that they 
peruse the dismal preachments of their father. I 
know one who, when she is happy, reads ' Nicholas 
Nickleby ;' when she is unhappy, reads 'Nicholas 
Nickleby;' when she is tired, reads 'Nicholas Nic- 
kleby ;' when she is in bed, reads 'Nicholas Nickleby;' 
when she has nothing to do, reads ' Nicholas Nickleby ;' 
and when she has finished the book, reads 'Nicholas 
Nickleby' over again. This candid young critic, at 
ten years of age, said, ' I like Mr. Dickens's books 



154 CHARLES DICKENS. 

much better than your books, papa ;' and frequently- 
expressed her desire that the latter author should 
write a book like one of Mr. Dickens's books. Who 
can ? Every man must say his own thoughts in his 
own voice, in his own way. Lucky is he who has 
such a charming gift of nature as this, which brings 
all the children in the world trooping to him, and 
very fond of him. ... I may quarrel with Mr. 
Dickens's art a thousand and a thousand times ; I 
delight and w^onder at his genius. I recognize in it 
— I speak with awe and reverence — a communication 
from that Divine Beneficence whose blessed task we 
know it will one day be to wipe every tear from 
every eye. Thankfully I take my share of the feast 
of love and kindness which this gentle, and generous, 
and charitable soul has contributed to the happiness 
of the world. I take and enjoy my share, and say 
a benediction for the meal." 

In Fraser's Magazine for March, 1842, Mr. Thack- 
eray gaA^e an extremely ludicrous account of a 
French adaptation of " Nicholas Nickleby," for the 
Ambigu-Comique Theatre. " Neekolass Neeklbee" 
he calls it, and laughable enough are a couple of 
designs from his own pencil that illustrate it. One 
of them is a picture of Neeklbee and " Smeek" de- 
parting from the " Paradis des Enfans" of Monsieur 
Squarrs ; the character of Smeek being sustained by 
a young lady who does not at all answer the re- 
quirements of her part in point of skinniness. The 
French playwright took the most extraordinary 
liberties with his victim. There is a Lor Clarendon, 
father of Meess Annabel, the beloved of Neeklbee ; 



PRIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 155 

and Sineek turns out to be the son and lieir, not of 
Ralph Nickleby, but of Lor Clarendon. There is 
an enormous subterranean vault, used by a gang of 
beggars and thieves, who are ruled by Ralph 
Nickleby in a mask ; and there is Lor Beef, a com- 
panion of Lor Clarendon ; and many other fearful 
scenes and personages very startling to anybody that 
has read the book. 

Having described this wondrous production of the 
French literary Comprachico, Mr. Thackeray turns 
about and administers a terrific scourging to Jules 
Janin, the well-known French newspaper critic, 
who had condemned Mr. Dickens on the evidence 
of the French production, charging him with im- 
modesty^ of all things in the world for a Frenchman 
to be squeamish about ! Janin could not read a 
word of English, for he said so in the preface of a 
French translation of Sterne's "Sentimental Jour- 
ney," which he helped to make. And for a further 
elucidation of him, and in particular of his notions 
about modesty, Mr. Thackeray shows that he " is 
the man who, when he was married (in a week when 
news was slack, no doubt), actually criticized his 
own marriage ceremony^ letting all the world see 
the proof-sheets of his bridal." . . . Also, that he 
calls " Clarissa Harlowe" " chaste," and thinks "Don 
Juan" not immoral, but only " animee" — animated. 
And finally he quotes Janin's summary of the de- 
merits of the work, which will be found rather sur- 
prising. It is, saith M. Janin, " the most disgusting 
mixture imaginable of warm milk and sour beer, 
of fresh eggs and salt beef, of rags and laced clothes, 



156 CHARLES DICKENS 

of gold crowns and coppers, of roses and dande- 
lions." And again : " If you love the fumes of to- 
bacco, the odor of garlic, the taste of fresh pork, the 
harmony of a pewter plate struck against an un- 
tinned copper saucepan, read me conscientiously 
this book of Charles Dickens. What sores ! What 
pustules !" 

There is more ; but this is abundance to show 
wdiat queer work the French litterateurs can make 
when they try, as well as how handsomely the Eng- 
lish satirist flagellated one of them for it. 

There is a pleasant story about one of Dickens's 
festive experiences, which shows a quickness and 
richness and readiness of imagination far more won- 
derful than the physical endurance and elasticity 
■which enabled him to play at leap-frog at seven in 
the morning after sitting up all night. It is told 
by a hearty admirer, who, after various instances 
of his interest in useful and benevolent public en- 
terprises, thus continues : 

" But, good as he was, the genial side of his nature 
shone out with pre-eminent brilliancy. He was wliat 
Dr. Johnson would have called ' a clubable man,' in 
the true sense of the term ; ever ready to enter into 
the whim which for the moment pleased the com- 
pany best, and to add his ever-flowing humor to the 
common amusement. We must not forojet a laus^h- 
able incident at the Garrick's Head, a rather noted 
tavern of the older t3'pe, in Bow-street, London. It 
was late in the evening. Father Prout, the inimita- 
ble wit, was at that hour, as usual, smoking a long 
'Churchwarden;' the late John Lang, editor of l^e 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 157 

MofassUUe (of Upper India), author of the ' Ex- 
Wife,' and many other excellent novels ; Mr. W. B. 
B. Stevens, solicitor to the late Sir Robert Peel ; 
George Grant, ex-judge of the Judder Adawlut 
(Bombay) ; Mr. I. II. Stocqueler, and Mr. Thornton 
Hunt, the editor of the London Telegi'ap\ were all, 
if the truth must be told, slightly under the influence 
of the different liquids they had imbibed during the 
evening. Mr. Lang was counsel for defence in the 
celebrated case of Jootee Pursaud against the Ben- 
gal government, and for which he received a fee of 
two lakhs of rupees (£20,000 or $100,000); he was 
at the same lime one of the most brilliant wits and 
poets in India, and one of the ablest relators of 
anecdotes in Europe. At this little supper Father 
Prout, by a series of manoeuvres, elicited story after 
story of real facts and scenes experienced by the 
India barrister and journalist, treasured in his extra- 
ordinary memory, and told with all his wealth of 
fancy and humor. Dickens capped story after story 
with his own. When Lang was mournful, Dickens 
was pathetic; when Lang was in earnest, Dickens 
was solemn; when Lang was merry, Dickens literally 
boiled over with fun, and the most singular thing 
was that all Dickens's stories were laid in Bengal, 
and the northwest provinces of India, with which 
Lang was thoroughly familiar. Every minute detail 
was told with such vivid accuracy that the whole 
party were astonished, and Mr. Lang refused to be- 
lieve that Dickens had never been in India, for while 
his own stories were founded on fact, Dickens's were 
the fruit of the imagination of the moment. This, 



158 CHARLES DICKENS. 

perhaps, showed his versatility more than anything 
he has published." 

"He was a man of practical charity," says one 
who knew him well both here and abroad, " and 
gave large sums judiciously every year. Indeed, he 
would get up in the night and go ten miles to aid 
any one who was suffering." 

It was by no means necessary, in order to receive 
kindness or civility from Dickens, to be of high rank, 
great influence, or already known to him. " In 
1842," writes one who knew him personally, '*I was 
staying with a gentleman named Thomas Withers, 
at Romney, in England. He was a printer by trade, 
and a man of original genius. He printed a work 
from the dictation of his own mind, without one 
word of a written manuscript. It was entitled 
* The Beauties of Creation.' I believe no man ever 
performed such a task before. He sent a copy of the 
work to Dickens. I saw his reply. He said: 'No 
work in my library shall I set greater store by, not 
only on account of its intrinsic merit, but because I 
consider it one of the greatest literary curiosities in 
England. Permit me to ask your acceptance of tlie 
handsomest edition I have of the literary trifles I 
have written, which the kindness of the people of 
England has received with a too partial approba- 
tion.' " 

He was always the ready friend and efticient 
helper of useful public enterprises. A writer who 
has already been quoted, thus speaks of his willing 
activity in this behalf: 

" Charles Dickens, although, perhaps, far from 



• PRIVATE LIFE, TliAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 150 

Strictly tempei'ate in his habits, was a warm friend 
and constant advocate of all measures or projects 
aimed at the diminution of the national vice of 
drunkenness. During the great agitation of the 
temperance movement in 1857, Lord Shaftesbury, 
Mr. Dickens, Mr. Fawcett, and Mr. John Stuart 
Mill, met together in one of the rooms adjoining 
St. James Hotel, to devise a scheme for meeting 
the increased and increasing evils, which Lord 
Shaftesbury argued were the result of the excite- 
ment caused by the Crimean war, and the return of 
the soldiers from active service. It was a singular 
quartette. Lord Shaftesbury, the representative of 
the Evangelical laymen of England ; John Stuart 
Mill, one of the most recondite thinkers of modern 
times ; Mr. Fawcett, an acute mathematician, a 
politician of the most advanced school, and com- 
pletely blind ; Mr. Dickens, the good-humored, 
genial painter of scenes drawn from every-day life, 
the novelist par excellence — and singularly enough, 
it was the pen of the latter that wrote the rough 
draft of the ideas and spirit of the numerous pamph- 
lets upon the subject which flooded England during 
1858 and 1859. Another social reform, the chief 
credit of which must be given to him, is the spread 
of the principles of life assurance through the 
masses. Every year in Household Words, and sub- 
sequently in All the Year Round, he published a 
series of articles demonstrating the practical advan- 
tage of prudent life assurance, and with invincible 
logic, but in plain and homely language, combated 
the objections which prejudice and dullness and 



160 CHARLES DICKENS. 

selfish fear hare raised among a large body of the 
people against the theory and practice of life assu- 
rance. Many a family would now be destitute had 
it not been for the foresight inculcated by Charles 
Dickens. And this led him to the consideration of 
other topics of a kindred nature, such as building 
societies, savings banks, mutual benefit associations, 
and the creation of funds for the support of the 
widows and orphans of different guilds, societies, or 
professions. At the dinners given by the Dramatic 
Society, Art Society, the Press Society, and the 
Printers' Association, all of which more or less re- 
semble savings banks, Charles Dickens was one of 
the most earnest, most popular, and most convincing 
speakers — one who, by his tongue, seemed to per- 
fect the work his pen, more than that of any other's, 
had begun." 

As might have been expected, his neighbors loved 
him. One account says : 

" He was extremely popular in the place where 
he lived, and when he returned from America the 
neigboring farmers draped their houses with flags to 
receive him." 

The following address by Mr. Dickens, as chair- 
man at an anniversary meeting of the London 
" News-venders' Benevolent Institution," shows how 
skilfully and gracefully he met the requirements of 
such a position. He introduced the toast of the 
evening with the following happy speech : 

" Ladies and gentlemen, you receive me with so 
much cordiality that I fear you believe that I really 
did once ride in the Lord Mayor's stage-coach. Permit 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 161 

me to assure you, in spite of the information received 
by Mr. Alderman Cotton, that I never had that honor. 
Furthermore, I beg to assure you that I never wit- 
nessed a Lord Mayor's Show, except from the 
situation obtained by other vagabonds on the pave- 
ment. In spite of this great cordiality of yours, I 
doubt if you fully know what a blessing it is for you 
that I occupy the chair to-night, because, having on 
several former occasions filled it on behalf of this 
society, and having said everything I could think of 
to say about it, and being, moreover, its president, I 
am placed to-night rather in the modest position of 
the host, who is not so much to display himself as to 
bring out his guests, — perhaps even to try to induce 
some to occupy his place on another occasion. And 
therefore you may be safely assured that, like Fal- 
staff, but with a modification of the quotation almost 
as large as himself, I shall endeavor rather to be the 
cause of speaking in others than to speak myself. 
Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a 
snufi*-shop the efiigy of a Highlander with an empty 
mull in his hand, who, having apparently taken all 
the snufF he can carry, and discharged all the sneezes 
of which he is capable, politely invites passers-by 
to step in and try what they can do in the same 
line. It is an appropriate instance of the univer- 
sality of the newsman's calling, that no toast we 
havd drunk to-night, no toast we shall drink to-night, 
and no toast we might, could, should, or would 
drink on any other night, is inseparable from that 
epitome of all possible subjects of human interest 
which the nBwsman delivers at our doors every day. 



162 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

Further, it may be worth the consideration of every- 
body present who has talked cheerfully to his or her 
neifrhbor since we sat down at the table, what in the 
name of Heaven should we have talked about, and 
how possibly should we have got on if our newsman 
had only for one single day forgotten us. As our 
newsman is not in the habit of forgetting us, let us 
try to cultivate the habit of not forgetting our news- 
man. Let us remember that his work is very ardu- 
ous, that it occupies him early and late, that the 
profits he derives from it are very small, that if he be 
master his capital is exposed to all sorts of hazard, 
and if he be a journeyman he himself is exposed to 
all sorts of weather and temper, and all sorts of un- 
reasonable requirements. I was once present in 
company where the question was asked. What is the 
most absorbing and the longest-lived passion of the 
human breast ? and an editor of vast experience, 
who was present, stated, with the greatest confi- 
dence, and supported his argument by proof, that it 
was the desire to obtain orders for the theatre. 
This made a great impression upon me, and 1 really 
lived in this faith for some time ; but it happened on 
one stormy night I was kindly escorted from a bleak 
railway-station to the little town which it represent- 
ed by a sprightly and vivacious newsman. To him 
I propounded the question as he went along under 
my umbrella, — What is the one absorbing passion 
of the human soul ? He replied, without the slight- 
est hesitation, that it certainly was the passion for 
getting your newspaper in advance of your fellow- 
creatures. Also, if you only hired it, to have it 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 163 

delivered at your door at exactly the same moment 
as another man who hired the same copy and lived 
four miles off; and finally, the invincible determina- 
tion on the part of each man not to believe that the 
time was up when the boy called for it. Well, as a 
sort of beacon in a sufficiently dark life, and as an 
assurance that there is among all classes of men a 
bond of brotherhood, the news-venders once upon a 
time established a benevolent and provident institu- 
tion. Under the provident head some small annu- 
ities are granted, and under the benevolent head 
relief is granted to temporary and proved distress. 
Under both heads I am bound to say that the aid is 
very humble and very sparing ; but if you would 
like it to be more, you have it in your power to 
make it so. Such as it is, it is most gratefully 
received, and it is most discreetly and feelingly ad- 
ministered, and it is- encumbered with no wasteful 
charges for management. During the last year we 
granted £100 in pensions and £70 in temporary 
relief, and we have invested in government securities 
some £400. I leave the interest of the institution in 
your hands, with the concluding observation, that it 
has had the good fortune to attract the sympathy of 
the eminent man of letters who now represents 
America at the court of St. James's, and that it 
includes in the number of its vice-presidents the 
great name of Longfellow." 

An English writer says, in describing Mr. Dick- 
ens's kindness as an editor, and general sweetness of 
disposition : 

" It was Dickens's rare art to bring the best out of 



164 CHARLES DICKENS. 

a man, and by kindly encouragement and generous 
appreciation to secure a cooperation which was affec- 
tionate as well as zealous. ' Whatever you see your 
way to, I will see mine to, and we know and under- 
stand each other well enough to make the best of 
these conditions,' was his recent reply to a contribu- 
tor who had proposed to send him a series of articles. 
He liked his literary staff to feel unfettered, and 
when he was once satisfied that the instrument to his 
hand was well-tempered and true, he rejoiced in giv- 
ing it play. Now and then, when some great public 
wrong fired him, he would pour out his indignation 
with a fertility of illustration which no one has com- 
manded in our time but himself; and he never fal- 
tered in protesting against wrong, or leaned unduly 
to a winning side. How tender he was to the poor, 
how considerate to the weak, how merciful, how truly 
great, it must be left to other pens to tell. This fal- 
tering record fulfils its purpose in recording that he 
has been buried with all honor, and in the very way 
he would have chosen ; that those whom he has left 
know their loss to be irreparable, and that they turn 
to the pure thoughts and tender fancies he has given 
to the world, and tearfully seek in them, and in 
words yet more sacred, some alleviation to their 
pain." 

Another, who had himself experienced the kind 
manner he describes, says : 

"In 1846 the Daily JSfeiGS was established in Lon- 
don, and Charles Dickens became its editor. I ob- 
tained a position on the staff of the paper, acting in 
various humble capacities, and occasionally tried my 



PKIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 165 

hand in writing articles on literature, art, and poli- 
tics. Like all youthful aspirants for fame in the 
journalistic world of the great city of London, I 
was frequently doomed to have my articles rejected 
by the editor-in-chief. But never shall I forget the 
kindness of Charles Dickens when it was his duty 
to tell me the ' article' could not be inserted. He 
saw the disappointment that was agitating me, but 
the tender smile, the kind Avords of encouragement 
that he used to utter, will ever be engraven in my 
memory." 

And Mr. Smalley, the cool and judicious European 
editor of The New York Tribune^ in a very well 
written article on Dickens, thus refers to his friends 
and enemies : 

"Putting aside his public life, you find in these 
narratives of his friends so much tenderness that it 
is easy to see the man was loved, not for his great 
gifts and universal fame, but for those personal 
qualities w^hich you find indeed in his books, but 
which are sweeter in private life than in any public 
expression. He had plenty of enemies, indeed. No 
man rises to his heio;ht in literature without makinsc 
them. They are known well enough in London. I 
could name two or three in the next line who would 
be known also in America, but they are as silent to- 
day as he who is dead. On the other hand, if I 
should begin to make a catalogue of the famous 
men in literature, in art, in politics, in science, who 
are among the dear and honored friends of Dickens, 
I should scarcely leave unmentioned one really great 
name among the Englishmen of to-day." 



166 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Mr. Henry F. Chorley, the well-known musical 
critic, speaks in the following enthusiastic terms of 
Mr. Dickens's benevolence : 

"The munificent sacrifices he made of time, 
money, and sympathy to men of letters, to artists, 
to obscure persons who had not the shadow of a 
shade of a claim on him, will never be summed up. 
There are thousands of persons living who could 
bear grateful testimony to this boundless generosity 
of his nature." 

With all his kindness, however, Mr. Dickens had 
— what every man needs — plenty of wrath and in- 
dignation and fight. He would not be bullied, he 
would not be driven from any position he had taken, 
he was fearless in exposing or punishing, when he 
thought proper to expose or punish. The anger of 
the Americans at the " American Notes" did not at 
all interfere with his repeating the substance of the 
offence, a hundred times intensified, in "Martin 
Chuzzlewit." When Chapman & Hall refused him 
some money that he wanted, he immediately took 
his business away from them ; and it has been 
computed that by refusing that £1,000, they lost 
£50,000. 

When he was editing JBentley's Miscellany he 
was not at all indulgent to the usually somewhat 
silly questions that h© had to deal with in writing 
the "Answers to Correspondents," but showed a 
visible irritability in them. In dealing with the 
" begging letters," which are a department of English 
professional mendicancy, and which are an invariable 
annoyance to eminently popular persons, he was 



PRIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 167 

pretty peremptory. Like Mr. Greeley, Mr. Beecher, 
and others, Mr. Dickens was most vigorously perse- 
cuted in his own right by beggars of every possible 
description. He had the advantage of them, however, 
in having been additionally persecuted on the ac- 
count of the Brothers Cheeryble. He mentioned in 
the original preface to "Nicholas Nickleby" that 
these old twins were real characters (they were 
Messrs. William and Daniel Grant of Manchester) ; 
and he adds, " If I were to attempt to sum up the 
hundreds upon hundreds of letters, from all sorts of 
people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, to which 
this unlucky paragraph has since given rise, I should 
get into an arithmetical difficulty from which I 
could not easily extricate myself Suffice it to say, 
that I believe the applications for loans, gifts, and 
offices of profit which I have been requested to for- 
ward to the originals of the Brothers Cheeryble 
(with whom I never interchanged any communica- 
tions in my life), would have exhausted the combined 
patronage of all the Lord Chancellors since the ac- 
cession of the House of Brunswick, and would have 
broken the Rest of the Bank of England." In 
April, 1850, he made a general declaration against 
the begging-letter writers,- in which he stated his 
experience with them ever since he began to be 
famous in 1836, beginning thus: 

'*I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some 
time, a chosen receiver of begging-letters. For 
fourteen years my home has been made as regular a 
receiving-house for such communications as any 
one of the great branch post-offices is for general 



168 CHARLES DICKENS. 

correspondence. I ought to know something of the 
beofofinor-letter writer. He has besiesred my door 
at all hours of the day and night ; he has fought 
my servant ; he has lain in ambush for me, going 
out and coming in ; he has followed me out of town 
into the country; he has appeared at provincial 
hotels, where I have been staying for only a few 
hours ; he has written to me from immense distances, 
when I have been out of England. He has fallen 
sick, he has died, and been buried ; he has come to 
life again, and again departed from this transitory 
scene ; he has been his own son, his own mother, his 
own baby, his idiot mother, his uncle, his aunt, his 
aged grandmother. He has wanted a great coat, to 
go to India in ; a pound, to set him up in life forever ; 
a pair of boots, to take him to the coast of China ; a 
hat, to get him into a permanent situation under 
government." 

There was a good deal more, and a very entertain- 
ing picture of these beggars it was ; but they do not 
seem to have been discouraged, for a little after the 
attack already mentioned, which caused Mr. Dickens 
to give up his reading so suddenly at Preston, he 
gave them the benefit of another sarcastic exposi- 
tion. On this occasion he also administered a good 
scorching to another class of plagues who are, if pos- 
sible, more abominable than beggars, to wit, people 
who give advice when they have no business to give 
it. In an article called " A Fly-Leaf in a Life," dis- 
cussing this attack and the solicitude of the public to 
account for it, Mr. Dickens favors the two sorts of 
pests in question with the following description : 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 169 

"But while I so rested, thankfully recoyering 
every hour, I had experiences more odd than this. 
I had experiences of spiritual conceit, for which, as 
giving me a new warning against that curse of man- 
kind, I shall always feel grateful to the supposition 
that I was too far gone to protest against playing 
sick lion to any stray donkey with an itching hoof. 
All sorts of people seemed to become vicariously re- 
ligious at my expense. I received the most uncom- 
promising warning that I was a Heathen; on the 
conclusive authority of a field preaclier, who, like 
the most of his ignorant and vain and daring class, 
could not construct a tolerable sentence in his native 
tongue or pen a fair letter. This inspired individual 
called rae to order roundly, and knew in the freest 
and easiest way where I was going to, and what 
would become of me if I failed to fashion myself on 
his bright example, and was on terms of blasphe- 
mous confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was 
in the secrets of my heart, and in the lowest sound- 
ings of my soul — he ! — and could read the depths of 
my nature better than his ABC, and could turn 
me inside out, like his own clammy glove. But 
what is far more extraordinary than this — for sucli 
dirty water as this could alone be drawn from such 
a shallow and muddy source — 1 found from the 
information of a beneficed clergyman, of whom I 
never heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, 
as I rather supposed I had, lived a life of some read- 
ing, contemplation, and inquiry ; that I had not 
studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate some 
Christian lessons in books; that I had never "tried, 
8 



170 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

as I rather supposed I had, to turn a child or two 
tenderly toward the knowledge and love of our 
Saviour ; that I had never had, as I rather supposed 
I had had, departed friends, or stood beside open 
graves; but that I had lived a life of 'uninter- 
rupted prosperity,' and that I needed this ' check, 
overmuch,' and that the way to turn it to account 
was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed, 
and written and issued by my correspondent ! I beg 
it may be understood that I relate facts of my own 
uncommercial experience, and no vain imaginings. 
The documents in proof lie near my hand. 

" Another odd entry on the fly-leaf, of a more 
entertaining character, was the wonderful persistency 
with which kind sympathizers assumed that I had 
injuriously coupled with the so suddenly relinquished 
pursuit, those personal habits of mine most obvi- 
ously incompatible with it, and most plainly impos- 
sible of being maintained, along with it. As, all 
that exercise, all that cold bathing, all that wind and 
weather, all that uphill training — all that everything 
else, say, which is usually carried about by express- 
trains in a portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken 
of under a flaming row of gas-lights in the company 
of two thousand people. This assuming of a whole 
case against all facts and likelihood, struck me as 
particularly droll, and was an oddity of which I cer- 
tainly had had no adequate experience in life until 
I turned that curious fly-leaf 

" My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers 
came out on the fly-leaf, very piously indeed. They 
were glad, at such a serious crisis, to offer me 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. iVl 

another opportunity of sending tliat post-office 
order. I needn't make it a pound, as previously 
insisted on ; ten shillings might ease my mind. 
And Heaven forbid that they should refuse, at such 
an insignificant figure, to take a weight oflT the mem- 
ory of an erring fellow-creature ! One gentleman, 
of an artistic turn (and copiously illustrating the 
books of the Mendicity Society), thought it might 
sooth my conscience in the tender respect of 
gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in 
aid of his lowly talent for original design — as a 
specimen of which he enclosed me a work of art 
which I recognize as a tracing from a woodcut 
originally published in the late Mrs. TroUope's book 
on America forty or fifty years age. The number of 
people who were prepared to live long years after 
me, untiring benefactors to their species, for fifty 
pounds a piece down, was astonishing. Also, of 
those who wanted bank notes for stiif penitential 
amounts, to give away — not to keep, on any account. 
"Divers wonderful medicines and machines insin- 
uated recommendations for themselves into the fly- 
leaf that was to have been so blank. It was espe- 
cially observable that every prescriber, whether in a 
moral or physical direction, knew me thoroughly — ■ 
knew me from head to heel, in and out, through and 
through, upside down. I was a glass piece of gen- 
end property, and everybody was on the most 
surprisingly intimate terms with me. A few public 
institutions had complimentary perceptions of cor- 
ners in my mind, of which, after considerable self- 
examination, I have not ^discovered any indication. 



172 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Neat little printed forms were addressed to those 
corners, beginning with these words : * I give and 
bequeath.' 

"Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief 
that the most honest, the most modest, and the least 
vain-glorious of all the records upon this strange fly- 
leaf, was a letter from the self deceived discoverer 
of the recondite secret ' how to live four or five 
hundred years ?' Doubtless it will seem so, yet the 
statement is not exaggerative by any means, but is 
made in my serious and sincere conviction. With 
this, and with a laugh at the rest that shall not be 
cynical, I turn the fly-leaf, and go on again." 

As he could be indignant, so he was always inde- 
pendent. He has been often called by that disagree- 
able English nickname " snob ;" and Mr. Hawthorne 
(whose observations about him are all at second 
hand) says of him : " Charles Dickens, who, born a 
plebeian, aspires to aristocratic society." But his 
frank fellowship with his literary brethren, with 
newspaper workers and venders, in short, with hu- 
man beings generally as such, does not look like 
snobbery at all ; neither does his gallery of aris- 
tocratic portraits look like that of a painter who 
sought to please. If Mr. Dickens had " aspired to 
aristocratic society" he would have furnished some 
pictures of another sort than Lord Frederic Veri- 
sopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir John Chester, Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, the Barnacles, and the Stiltstalk- 
ings. But there is nothing to ofl*set them. And 
it is a matter of record that he would not submit to 
even a discourtesy of form, even from his sovereign, 



PKIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 173 

and that sovereign a lady, and a lady personally so 
honored and beloved as Victoria. Mr. Smalley thus 
tells the story of the occurrence, and of the subse- 
quent friendship, honorable to both parties : 

" Among his sincere mourners is the Queen. The 
relations between her and Mr. Dickens were once 
so far from being true, that Mr. Dickens felt himself 
obliged to decline an invitation to the Court. He 
was, in fact, invited as an amateur actor and reader, 
but being invited only as such, refused. With a 
sense of the dignity of his profession, only too rare 
in England, he said that while he yielded to nobody 
in proper respect for his sovereign, he would not 
enter any house professionally where he could not 
be received on equal terms socially. It was the 
ridiculous punctilio of some gold-stick-in-waiting 
that stood between the Queen and Mr. Dickens, and 
it happened so long ago, that it is only worth 
remembering, to show how much wiser the Queen 
has proved in such matters than her counsellors . 
She put aside, or probably there was no need to put 
aside, the foolish suggestions of etiquette, and of 
late years the Queen has welcomed Mr. Dickens to 
her house, as she welcomes any other guest of dis- 
tinction. There had grown up between them a feel- 
ing of personal friendship. The Queen sent him her 
book, with a graceful note saying how unworthy 
such a trifle was of the acceptance of him who was 
the chief among the writers of her time. Mr. Dick- 
ens, not long before his death, gave to the Queen a 
copy of the library edition of his works. She put 
it in her private cabinet, and asked Mr. Helps to let 



174 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Mr. Dickens know that his gift was placed where it 
would be always plainest in her sight and readiest 
to her hand. The letter containing this message 
reached the great novelist's home while he lay 
slowly dying and unconscious. It is known that 
public honors have been pressed by the Queen and 
her advisers upon Mr. Dickens. After what he said 
at Liverpool last year, he could not well be oifered 
a peerage, but he might have had that or any lesser 
title if he would. Times have changed a little since 
Macaulay was happy and proud to accept what Dick- 
ens could refuse without pride or oflense, but simply 
because he thought the dignity unsuited to him. 
"When he had gratefully declined everything else, 
the Queen asked him to accept a seat in her Privy 
Council. If he would not have that either, I pre- 
sume it was because it confers the title of Right 
Honorable, and he preferred to be simply Charles 
Dickens. Intelligence of his death was sent by 
telegraph to Balmoral, and Col. Ponsonby, one of 
the household officers, replied, ' The Queen com- 
mands me to express her deepest regret at the sad 
news of Chai-les Dickens's death.'" 

In like manner as manly strength and positive 
self-respect upheld his kindness and jovial friend- 
ship, so manly common sense, the most regular, per- 
sonal, and business habits, and uncommon tact and 
ability as a business man, upheld and reinforced his 
literary and creative genius. 

" When in London, he lived mostly at the Garrick 
Club, where he filled as large a place as John Dry- 
den used to fill at Will's Coffee-house. There was. 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 175 

at one time, some alarm created lest he should leave 
the Garrick, in consequence, as it was whispered, 
of the fact that one of his friends and publishers 
had been black-balled there ; but the trouble was 
composed, and the Garrick knew him to the last. 
His town apartments were comfortably fitted up, 
but were not in the fashionable quarter. They con- 
stituted the second floor of the house in Wellington- 
street, Strand, the lower part of which was occupied 
by the business offices of All the Year Hound. 
Mayfair saw little of Dickens, nor was Belgravia 
one of his familiar haunts. We believe he was never 
presented at court ; but it was not long ago, since 
his last return from the United States, that the 
Queen invited him to come and see her, and he 
spent a day with her at Windsor Castle." 

When in London, Dickens might be seen at din- 
ner more frequently than anywhere else at Verey's, 
a restaurant in the upper part of Regent-street, 
where, often with Wilkie Collins, he sat at a little 
table in the corner reserved for him especially by 
the maitre cThotel. 

"Whatever," says The Daily N'ews^'-'-\\{i said should 
be done, those who knew him regarded as accom- 
plished. There was no forgetfulness, no procras- 
tination, no excuse, when the time for granting a 
promised favor came. His hours and days were 
spent by rule. He rose at a certain time, he retired 
at another, and, though no precisian, it was not often 
that his arrangements varied. His hours for writ- 
ing were between breakfast and luncheon, and when 
there was work to be done no temptation was suffi- 



IV 6 CHARLES DICKENS. 

ciently strong to cause it to be neglected. This 
order and regularity followed him through the day. 
His mind was essentially methodical, and in his 
long walks, in his recreations, in his labor, he was 
governed by rules laid down for himself by himself, 
rules well studied beforehand, and rarely departed 
from. 

In the reminiscences, already quoted, of Mr. 
Mitchell, he gives this interesting time-table of Mr. 
Dickens's usual day at Gad's Hill, and of his way of 
living : 

" The j3opular notion that Mr. Dickens died from 
irregularities of life we believe unfounded. He was 
a generous liver, in the English sense of that term. 
He loved a good dinner. He kept a French cook. 
He took wine with his dinner habitually, and very 
likely a sip of Cognac after dinner — in the manner 
of nine out of ten Englishmen whose style of living 
was on the same scale with his. 

" But, on the other hand, he was most methodic in 
his habits. He indulged in no stimulants to quicken 
his working power, or before the hour of dinner, at 
six P.M. 

*'He rose ordinarily at seven, or thereabout; 
devoted an hour to his mail and correspondence; 
breakfasted in the free and easy way which belongs 
to most English country-houses ; lit a cigar in the 
closing breakfast hour, and, that done, went to his 
study and his work — denying, ordinarily, all inter- 
ruptions until one or two o'clock of the afternoon. 

"In this period of work — as he has told us — he 
never smoked, and never employed an amanuensis. 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. \11 

Every word of all his great array of volumes has 
been written out in his own hand. 

" The morning's work being over, he set out upon 
his tramp — fifteen miles of walk as a usual thing 
with him ; and thirty miles of walk no uncommon 
thing. 

" He entertained the idea that mental fatigue and 
labor could be balanced by corresponding physical 
exercise — an idea that has a measure of truth in it, 
if the balance be adroitly kept. But with Mr. Dick- 
ens the balance was not kept; for on these long 
walks the creatures of his brain were his daily at- 
tendants, and while he strode away over the Kentish 
meadows, he was calculating the issues of his stories 
and fabricating scenes that were next day to take 
color in his words." 

Mr. Smalley, whose appreciative and sensible let- 
ter about Dickens has already been praised and used 
in these pages, gives the following little narrative 
of the proposition made to Mr. Dickens to write a 
novel expressly for an American audience, and of 
the reasons in our statute law which prevented him 
from doing so : 

"My acquaintance with Mr. Dickens was slight, 
and I cannot add much out of my personal knowledge 
of him to the general store. I first met him in 1866. 
A friend had given me a note of introduction, which 
brought me an invitation to call on him the next 
day at the oftice of All the Year Hound in Wel- 
lington-street, Strand. My errand was not one of 
curiosity, but of business. The Tribune wanted him 
to write a novel for its readers. He was very wil- 
8* 



MS CHARLES DICKENS. 

ling to do it, and was pleased by a request of that 
sort coming from the leading journal of America. 
I don't know whether his last visit had then been 
planned, but he talked about the country and the 
people in a tone which struck me as a pleasing con- 
trast to that which many English friends of ours 
assume. He did not think it necessary to patronize 
the United States. As to the novel meant to have 
been written for us, its failure was due to a cause which 
I beg to commend to such people as still oppose, no 
matter for what reason, an act of legislation that 
honest men on both sides of the water are agreed in 
demanding. Mr. Dickens had closely studied the 
law in respect to copyright between England and 
America. He was of opinion that it was not pos- 
sible to convey to us or reserve to himself the legal 
property in a novel to be written by him in England 
and published by 77ie Tribune \n America. We 
have to thank the party which believes in piracy for 
preventing Mr. Dickens. from writing what I think 
he was sincerely desirous of writing, a novel expressly 
composed for his, friends in America." 

The shrewdness which suggested the "serial" 
method of publication to Mr. Dickens has already 
been referred to ; and his regularity and solicitous 
and eifective supervision of his periodical has also 
been described. Mr. Smalley,in describing his further 
conversation with Mr. Dickens, furnishes other strik- 
ing details on the subject. He says: 

" This interview lasted for perhaps an hour and a 
half, and as the talk turned mainly on business, it is 
natural that I should have remarked the very unu- 



PKIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 179 

sual business capacity which Mr. Dickens showed. 
Then and afterward, to me as to other casual 
acquaintances, he spoke freely about his own aifairs. 
I presume it is not generally known that he has for 
many years been his own publisher. Messrs. Chap- 
man & Hall's names appear on the title-pages of 
his books, but they have been only Mr. Dickens's 
agents. lie owned the copyriglit of every one of 
his novels. In early days, it is true, before his fame 
had increased, and before the property in any one of 
his novels had become a fortune, he had sold his rights 
as author in a considerable number of his books. 
All these he repurchased, often by dint of great 
trouble, and by difficult negotiations, always at a 
price far beyond that which they had brought in the 
beginning. It was not only a matter of calculation 
with Mr. Dickens, it was a matter of pride. His 
books are his children ; he did not want them in a 
stranger's hand, nor subject to the authority of any- 
body but their author. The copyrights were much 
dispersed, and when it became known that Mr. 
Dickens was bent on buying them up, the price, 
which was already high, advanced very consider- 
ably. The British book publisher is just as capable 
of driving a hard bargain as his American rival, and 
Mr. Dickens had to pay dearly for his discovery of 
that interesting fact. At last he carried his point, 
and held in his own grasp by a good legal title all 
his earlier writings. With the later ones he had never 
parted ; with none, I suppose, during the last twenty 
years. Every six months Messrs. Chapman & Hall 
handed in their accounts. It was Mr. Dickens who 



180 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

settled the terms of publication, the form in whieh 
each successive edition should appear, and all other 
details. What is called the Charles Dickens edition 
was his idea and his favorite, not on account of its 
beauty or readableness, for it is printed compactly 
in small type, but on account of its cheapness. 
What pleased him was tliat everybody shoidd be 
able to buy a complete set of his writings, and so he 
had them all condensed into, I think, seventeen vol- 
umes, separately published and sold at three shillings 
and sixpence each. He understood the market, 
studied it, and adapted the supply of his books to 
the demand. He told me four years ago that the 
copyright of each one of his books became every 
year more valuable; that is, brought in more actual 
money. It is to be regretted that there is no really 
satisfactory edition among the many that have ap- 
peared. I think it was always Mr. Dickens's intention 
to issue his complete works in a form worthy of their 
place in literature; perhaps after what is now called 
the library edition had been exhausted, or the stereo- 
type plates from which it is printed worn out ; or 
perhaps after the series had grown more complete in 
liis own mind, and better satisfied his restless eager- 
ness for work." 

Like the scrupulous honor of a good business man 
was the laborious faithfulness with which this won- 
derful genius and even improvisatore, instead of 
trusting to the " inspiration of the moment" which 
younger and smaller minds sometimes venture to 
wait for, was accustomed to prepare himself. The 
iVe?6'-s, in referring to the difficulty of working 



PRIVATE IJFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 181 

which Mr. Dickens began to experience over his last 
book, says, on this point : 

" When Mr. Dickens complained of his work giv- 
ing him trouble, we may be snre that the cause 
prompting the remark was not vslight, for no writer 
set before himself more laboriously the task of giv- 
ing the public his very best. A great artist, who 
once painted his portrait while he was in the act of 
writing one of the most popular of his stories, relates 
that he was astonished at the trouble Dickens 
seemed to take over his work, at the number of 
forms in which he would write down a thought be- 
fore he hit out the one which seemed to his fastidi- 
ous fancy the best, and at the comparative small- 
ness of the amount of manuscript each day's silting 
seemed to have produced. Those, too, who have 
seen the original manuscript of his works, many of 
which he had bound and kept at his residence at 
Gad's Hill, describe them as full of interlineations 
and alterations; while it is well known that the 
quaint surnames of his characters, concerning which 
essays have been written, were the result of much 
painstaking. 

"Dickens, w^ith a genius which might have justi- 
fied his trusting it implicitly and solely, placed his 
chief reliance on his own hard labor." 

In like manner, the following account of his way 
of life, during his readings in America, shows his 
astonishingly vivid sense of the obligation to work 
hard and do his best. But the truth is, whatever 
may be the vulgar notion about genius, that so far 
from being above the necessity of honest exertion, it 



182 CHARLES DICKENS. 

might almost be said that its very essence is honest 
exertion. It might almost be defined as industry, 
white hot. The Boston narrator wrote : 

"His rooms are at the Parker House, and there he 
has remained busily engaged all day in writing and 
study, excepting when he is engaged in taking his 
daily eight-mile ' constitutional' walk with his pub- 
lisher, Fields, and steadily declining all the invita- 
tions to breakfast, dinner, tea, supper, parties, balls, 
and drives that hospitable Boston pours in upon him 
in an unfailing stream. Most of his time is spent in 
the most laborious, pains-taking study of the parts 
he is to read. Indeed, the public has but little idea 
of the cost — in downright hard work of mind, body, 
and voice — at which these readings are produced. 
Although Mr, Dickens has read now nearly five hun- 
dred times, I am assured, on the best authority, that 
he never attempted a new part in public until he 
had spent at least two months over it in study as 
faithful and searching as Rachel or Cushman would 
give to a new character. This study extends not 
merely to the analysis of the text, to the discrimina- 
tion of character, to the minutest points of elocu- 
tion ; but decides upon the facial expression, the 
tone of the voice, the gesture, the attitude, and even 
the material surroundings of the actor, for acting it 
is, not reading, in the ordinary sense, at all. Mr. 
Dickens is so essentially an artist that he cannot 
neglect the slightest thing that may serve to heighten 
the effect of what he has undertaken to do. And he 
is so conscientious, so strict in his dealings — a very 
martinet in business and thoroug;h man of affairs — 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 183 

that he will leave nothing undone that time and 
labor can do, to give to the public that pays so much 
for the pleasure of hearing him the full worth of its 
money. This is the reason why he, a man of the 
world, greatly delighting in society, thoroughly 
fitted to enjoy it himself, deliberately cuts himself 
off from it until his task shall be done. ' I am come 
here,' he says, ' to read. The people expect me to 
do my best, and how can I do it if I am all the tin^e 
on the go ? My time is not my own, when I am pre- 
paring to read, any more than it is when I am wait- 
ing a novel ; and I can as well do one as the other, 
without concentrating all my powers on it till it is 
done.'" 

Mr. Dickens is supposed to have left a fortune of 
somewhere about £60,000, say $300,000. Had he 
been parsimonious, or even saving, it would have 
been many times greater. 

A very moderate acquaintance with Mr. Dickens's 
writings will suffice to explain his general views 
and ways of thinking. He was always a lib- 
eral and a reformer in the interests of humanity, 
but without bigotry or sectarianism. He was a 
" wide liker," more ready to praise than to blame, 
to think good rather than evil, to hope rather than 
to despair. 

x\bout his religious character a good deal has 
been said, and some of it in such away that it would 
not be proper to omit some brief consideration of the 
subject, chiefly with reference to a single question. 
The nature of that question may be gathered from 
the following facts : 



184 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Some years ago, the Scotch sensational essayist, 
Gilfillan, in a lecture at Liverpool, plainly charged 
that Dickens was an immoral writer, so far as the 
influence of his books was concerned ; and the 
reason which he gave was, that Dickens nowhere 
recognizes the doctrine of eternal punishment. 

A very respectable religious newspaper, the Chi- 
cago Advcmce, trying to be as mild in censure as 
conscience will permit, and framing its charges with 
great caution, says : 

" We should not be true to our most sacred con- 
victions did we not express regret that Mr. Dick- 
ens did not manifest more appreciation of the gos- 
pel of Jesus Christ as a remedy for sin, and as an 
elevating power in human society. He did not 
attack or deride it. He did not seek to undermine 
it. We believe that in his heart he had a deep rev- 
erence for its truth and work. But he was too 
nearly silent in its praise, while he described and 
even caricatured the faults of its professors, and rep- 
resented his purest and most attractive characters 
as having everything by a mere natural goodness, 
and as living without reference to the Church of 
Christ, or habitual prayer to God." 

Other religious newspapers of similar standing 
have expressed a like grief at the " absence of the 
religious element" in his writings ; the Watchman 
and Reflector^ for instance, observing: "It is sad 
that the really Christian element is lacking in his 
pages." 

A less intelligent and respectable newspaper, the 
Pittsburg United Presbyterian^ has put the case thus : 



PRIYxVTE LITE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 185 

" A writer of low life, the author of a class of fic- 
tion that does nothing for language, literature, or 
morals, he has contributed but lightly to the real 
good of his race, and deserves only partial regret 
now that he has gone. When Dickens visited 

this country, over a year ago, he spent 

$50,000, it is said, buying up the press to praise 
him, and passed through the land in a sordid strug- 
gling for money." 

And a clergyman at Boston preached a whole 
discourse of condemnation. He used as a text the 
three passages, "Vanity of vanities ;" " Verily they 
have their reward ;" and " For they loved the praise 
of men more than the praise of God," Amono- the 
assertions which followed were these : that Mr. 
Dickens was one of the subjects of the world of fic- 
tion ; that he had " neglected the soul — the immor- 
tal part;" that " he has written and read many a line 
which is deadly poison ;" and that " a man who 
would thus associate religion (^. e. as in the caseof Mr. 
Murdstone, and the schoolmaster in " Copperfield"), 
with the lack of all the genial affections of humanity, 
with repulsive and forbidding sternness, with ava- 
rice and meanness, and all this odiousness exhibited 
as a usual concomitant and result of religion, is a 
public calamity, and I have no hesitation in afiirm- 
ing that such morals have done more to undermine 
belief in the reality of a change of heart and spiritual 
communion with God, and to destroy reverence for 
the Bible, than has been done within the same 
period by Tom Paine's "Age of Reason." 

"N"ow the reply to these different phases of one and 



186 CHARLES DICKENS. 

the same objection is obvious. It is simply that it 
is not necessarily the business of a novelist to teach 
denominational theology ; nor theology of any kind ; 
nor even religion. It may be his business to do so, 
and if he does, the fact is not a sound objection to 
his books. At the same time, if he does so, it will 
be made an objection by those who dislike his par- 
ticular theological views, or who dislike religious 
novels. For instance, the Rev. Mr. Huntington has 
written one or two "high-church" novels, which 
high-church Episcopalians are likely to be pleased 
with, and which New England Calvinistic Presby- 
terians and Congregationalists are likely to be dis- 
pleased with. Yet the high-church Episcopalianism 
of the books is in fact neither here nor there. It is 
like the color of the binding, or the quality of the 
paper, or the size of the type ; it is a reason for like 
or dislike by one and another individual, but not for 
an absolute judgment that the book is either bad or 
good in an artistic sense, or an ethical sense, or a 
religious sense. Cardinal Wiseman's little Romanist 
novel of " Fabiola" is another case in point. So is 
Henry Brooke's "Fool of Quality," thougli in the 
more general sense, as religious, not as sectarian. 

For a novelist to put enough of Christianity into 
his book to show that he is a Christian, or to make 
the book a teacher of Chi-istianity, in the sense of 
absolutely perfecting the purpose, is impracticable. 
Will a Unitarian doctrine of Christ be sufficient — a 
Socinian, or an Arminian view? A Sabellian one? 
Doctor Bushnell's view? Or must it be a Ilopkin- 
ian Calvinism ; or the views of the elder Edwards ? 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 187 

What tribunal shall decide upon the sufficiency of 
tlie infusion ? And if any one of the various sects 
of Christians is satisfied, who shall guarantee the 
author against objections from the other sects? 

Again: a novelist is to a great extent an artist. 
If novels must be imbued Avith perceptible Chris- 
tianity, so must poems ; so must painting and sculp- 
ture. The fundamental requirement is the same for 
all : that pictures of life must teach Christianity. 
Now the real truth is, that he whose vocation is to 
teach Christianity, should teach it; but he whose 
vocation is not, except that he is bound to live and 
act in exemplification of its principles, should not. 
There was a cobbler who thought he had a call to 
preach. He was allowed a hearing before a synod 
of clergymen, and one of them, deputed to give the 
poor fellow his answer, thus delivered himself : 
"Brother, we are of opinion that there is a diversity 
of gifts. Some have the gift of teaching, and some 
the gift of cobbling. It is the judgment of the 
assembly that you have the gift of cobbling, and 
that it is your duty to exercise it." The cobbler 
would have been wrong to have insisted on stitching 
a doctrinal text on the toe of every shoe he made; all 
he had to do was to make good shoes to the best of 
his ability. Mr. Church is not found fault with be- 
cause there is no Christianity in his " Niagara" or his 
"Andes;" nor Delaroche for the want of it in his 
"Marie Antoinette ;" nor J. Q. A. Ward for the 
want of it in his " Indian Hunter." Fra Angelico, 
Scheffer, Overbeck, painted religious pictures, and 
they were right; it was their vocation; but they 



188 CHARLES DICKENS. 

were no more within their duty than Callot, or 
Teniers, or Paul Potter. 

The very same objection has been made to Walter 
Scott. When Bulwer dies, it will be brought against 
him, and with far more show of reason. It has 
never been brought against Grimm's collection of 
German fairy stories, nor Hoffmann's incomparable 
fantasy pieces, nor the tender beauty of Fouque's 
Undine, nor even against the cold materialist won- 
drousness of Edgar A. Poe's stories. It should be, 
if it holds against Dickens. 

The novelist's business is to depict what lie sees, 
as he sees it, to the best of his ability, under the 
universal human obligation of doing right and 
avoiding to do wrong. If Mr. Dickens did this, all 
these charges are, as reasons for disapprobation, 
insignificant, and their only use is to explain the 
individual preference of one man or another. And 
that Mr. Dickens did this, no one has denied. 

But this argument from the literary side of the 
question is not all. It is a plea in abatement; it 
shows that the charge of having on the whole done 
evil and not good, for the reason alleged, cannot be 
maintained, and must be dismissed. 

But it is just to add something of a positive 
nature, in order to give the means of a just judgment. 
Mr. Dickens was, if not a " member of an ortiiodox 
church, in good and regular standing," yet a man 
who believed in and admired Christianity; who 
tried to live in accordance with its rules; who 
taught them to his children and demonstrated them 
in his books in good faith and to the best of his 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 189 

ability, and in a manner which has satisfied wise and 
pious men that his work on earth has not been on 
the whole evil, but has been a very great good. In 
the paper called " A Fly-leaf from a Life," already 
quoted, Mr. Dickens asserted in plain terms that he 
had endeavored to inculcate Christian lessons ; in 
the letter, also already quoted, and written in the 
last hours of his conscious life, he repeated the 
avowal even more explicitly, and added that he had 
even re-written the Life of Christ expressly for his 
own children; and in his will he urges his children to 
"practise Christianity in a broad spirit, not accept- 
ing the narrow construction of any man or any sect." 

Rev. Henry White, a clergyman of the Church of 
England, and chaplain to the English House of Com- 
mons, in a sermon at the Savoy Chapel in London, 
although he professed to have found neither in- 
culcations of doctrine, nor exemplifications of formal 
Christian observances in the works of Dickens, yet 
described him as a teacher of Christianity. He said 
that Mr. Dickens had done by his writings essential 
service to the Christian church. There was a purity 
and heartiness in his writings which were a natural 
consequence of his character, and this might be 
understood by the fact that one of the last letters 
he wrote, if, indeed, not the very last, was written 
with a view to remove a calumny that he had been 
unfaithful to Christian truth. Mr. Dickens, the rev- 
erend chaplain said, had taught Christianity with 
much greater effect than many priests had done. 

At a week-day evening meeting in the church of 
liev. H. W. Beecher, one of his deacons havins: 



190 CHAELES DICKENS. 

expressed his anxiety as to whether Mr. Dickens per- 
sonally was a Christian, Mr. Beecher himself an- 
swered, speaking both to the personal point and to 
the character of his works. He said : 

"I suppose that the loss we have sustained will 
produce more of a feeling of personal loss than any 
that has occurred since the death of Walter Scott. 

"Dickens was the man of the household. He was 
a man with gentle, sympathetic, and human feeling 
— more so than almost any that used the pen. He 
took hold of what we might call the great middle 
class of feeling in the human mind. Whether he 
was a Christian man in the experimental sense, God 
only knew. We can speak about his personal pri- 
vate life. The other question is a difficult matter to 
decide. When a man is brought up under differ- 
ent circumstances and in different institutions from 
our own, they will be apt to apparently differ, and 
he will be hardly recognized from them. We are 
influenced by some men whom it is very difficult 
to appraise or classify, or say whether they were a 
little nearer that or this side, or whether they were 
truly Christian or not. I recollect that my father 
had great doubts at one time as to the Christian life 
and character of Bishop Heber, and expressed his 
doubts thereof; but no one in this generation would 
entertain these doubts for a moment. 

" Mr. Dickens has accomplished more than any 
man in his life-work — so to speak — without any dis- 
tinctive Christian bias. His labors, and the results 
attendant thereon, were far different from those of 
Bulwer and Byron. His writings do not teach pride. 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 191 

and certainly have no tendencies toward license and 
dissipations, but the generic influences of his writings 
are to make man more pure and humane, and to ren- 
der the household more happy and contented. In 
the matter of drink I would make an exception, be- 
cause he did not stand upon that ground upon which 
God, in his providence, was bringing the people to 
realize the blessings of temperance. Dickens be- 
longed to the old school, and lam glad to know that 
the old school was passing away. He was a true 
benefactor of his race. Though he did hot under- 
take the work of a higher sphere — the spiritual ele- 
ment — yet he accomplished much good and obtained 
much success, and it w^as God's ordinance. Seldom 
was a man permitted to see the fruits of his works 
as he was. Some of his writings were devoted to 
the amelioration of human society, and it would be 
found that in no respect had he failed to accomplish 
good in this res})ect. In his tale of ' Nicholas Nick- 
leby' he aimed to expose the evils of the school sys- 
tem then in existence, and this evil was afterward 
remedied — public opinion being drawn to a consid- 
eration of the subject. We should be thankful to 
God for the work that he has been raised up to ac- 
complish in the lower sphere. He did well, and 
passed ofi* from the stage in the full enjoyment of 
his faculties, as it were, gone in a moment. I would 
not cling to the heresy of the Episcopal prayer 
book. I would never pray that God would keep me 
from sudden death. I would like to be taken for 
once and for all, and that would prevent me from 
going to the shop for repairs. Dickens died at the 



192 CHARLES DICKENS. 

right time. He did his work well, and he was enti- 
tled to be reckoned among the best and noblest of 
men. 

" It will be a pleasure to me to remember that he 
used our church for a reading hall. He said to me, 
* Never build another church ; you cannot get another 
so good as this for speaking.' His cordial invitation 
to visit his house as a guest if I went to England 
seems more valued than ever, now that he is gone. 
When he extended it to me I received it as a great 
honor. One of the most precious remembrances of 
my life was the kiss Louis Kossuth gave me. As 
the poet Landor said, 'No king could confer an 
honor upon him, for Louis Kossuth had embraced 
him,' so I felt in regard to my pleasant intimacy 
with Charles Dickens." 

Hon. H. J. Raymond, who, unlike these two 
witnesses, was neither professionally a clergyman 
nor a " professing Christian," in his remarks at the 
New York Press dinner to Mr. Dickens, testified to 
an influence from his writings, whose description 
coincides pretty well with what is usually supposed 
to be the proper influence of Christianity upon 
practical life. He said : 

" Everything that he has ever written — I say it 
without the slightest exception of a single book, a 
single page, or a single word that has ever pro- 
ceeded from his pen — has been calculated to infuse 
into every human heart the feeling that every man 
was his brother, and that the highest duty he could 
do to the world, and the highest pleasure he could 
confer upon himself, and the greatest service he 



PIUVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 193 

could render to humanity, was to bring that other 
heart, whether high or low, as close to his own as 

possible But I know that there is not a 

man here, and there is not a man who has known 
any man here, who knows anything of his writings, 
who has made himself familiar with their spirit or 
has yielded to their influence, who has not been 
made thereby a better, as w^ell as a wiser, kinder, 
and nobler man." 

St. Paul (I Cor. xiii. 13) has said, "And now 
abideth Faith, Hope, and Charity, these three ; but 
the greatest of these is charity." It is not too much 
to demand that we accept Mr. Dickens's own avowal 
of faith in Christianity ; and of having tried to teach 
it, which proves he had hope from it. And for his 
practice of the third and greatest of them all, which 
he could not properly claim — kindness and good- 
will and beneficence— we may trust the absolutely 
unanimous voice of all who have received his ready 
sympathy, his equally ready praise, or his unfailing 
and generous bounty. As one writer has observed, 
he had abundance of the religion of Abou Ben Adhem 
and the golden rule. 

Mr. Dickens was not formally a member of any 
church communion; but his most usual place of 
attending divine worship was a Unitarian one. 

It only remains to close this short outline with an 
attempt to sketch some of the qualities and char- 
acteristics of Mr. Dickens as an author. 

He seems to have always been fond of readino- 
books of the same sort that he wrote. One of the 
autobiographic- touches in one of his prefaces de- 
9 



194 CHAKLES DICKENS. 

scribes him, when a little boy, as " full of Partridge, 
Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza." He liked 
Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe; and one evening, as 
Mr. Forster has recorded in his Life of Land or, asked 
a question that showed a very unusual fact — that he 
had not only read, but had critically considered, that 
book. In reply to an observation by Landor about 
David Copperfield, says Forster, Dickens "replied 
by a question which, from so po^verful and so 
gentle a master of both laughter and tears, startled 
us then, and may make the matter worth allusion 
still. *But is it not yet more wonderful that one 
of the most popular books on earth has absolutely 
nothing in it to cause any one either to laugh or 
cry?' Such, he proceeded to say, was to be affirmed 
with confidence of De Foe's masterpiece ; he in- 
stanced the death of Friday, in that marvellous 
novel, as one of the least tender, and in the true 
sense, least sentimental things ever written; and 
he accounted for the prodigious effect which the 
book has had upon an unexampled number and 
variety of readers, though without tears in it, or 
laughter, or even any mention of love, by its mere 
homely force and intensity of truth. Not every 
school-boy alone was interested by it, but every 
man who had ever been one." He read a good deal 
of English and also of French belles-lettres literature, 
and one writer has recorded the following rather 
oddly-worded hints about his preferences in the latter: 
"Dickens had for Balzac a kind of frightened 
admiration. He reproached him for his excessive 
egotism, but he greatly preferred him to George 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 195 

Sand, whose style he was, as a foreigner, almost 
unable to appreciate. Dickens knew, however, very 
much of the French belles-lettres. He knew by heart 
Gozlan's *'AristideFroissard;"the posthumous novels 
of Mery seemed to give him moments of the great- 
est joy. M. Feval has seen him at once laughing 
and crying over a page of Alphonse Daudet." 

The greatest secret of Dickens's success — of his 
maintained originality, his power, fullness, freshness, 
perennial literary strength and life is an open secret. 
It is the same with that of another eminent person, 
very unlike Dickens in the object of his professional 
pursuits, but singularly like him in his mode of inves- 
tigating and collecting the facts of life which are to 
be used in those pursuits — Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 
The tirst and chiefest wonder about each of them is, 
that he can produce so much and so long without 
sameness or repetition. The endless variety of Mr. 
Dickens's personages, the endless variety of Mr. 
Beecher's instances and solutions in applied mental 
philosophy and illustration from animate and inani- 
mate nature, are maintained by their following one 
and the same rule — a rule by which they could keep 
up their attractiveness as long as the human race 
exists. It is simply to gather fresh from the infi- 
nite stream of humanity around them what they 
interpret again to its members in their audiences. 
They receive endlessly, and transmit endlessly, for 
the variety of life is endless ; they cannot cease to 
see and to set forth fresh new matter (under the or- 
dinary limitations of their own humanity of course) 
until God ceases to create new human being^s. Too 



196 CHARLES DICKENS. 

frequently it has been the case that romancers and 
sermonizers alike, have looked inside of themselves 
instead of outside, and after quickly exhausting 
one little human interior, have had no more to say, 
and have fallen into either silence, repetition, or 
babble. 

Dickens was an intuitionist ; he proceeded by see- 
ing ; and he saw, apprehended, and remembered with 
rare quickness and fidelity. His mind was full, and 
always filling, with faces, traits, names, and sayings 
innumerable ; and he recalled each as he wanted it, 
without conscious effort, just as he at once remem- 
bered Mr. Hall, who came to see him about " Pick- 
wick," having casually seen him once, two or three 
years before, in buying a magazine of him. 

He was immensely productive and versatile. His 
novels alone were a noble achievement for a life ; 
but besides them, he did good work in travels and 
biography; in a great number of short stories, 
sketches, and miscellaneous articles ; in still greater 
number of speeches, addresses, and letters ; in a vast 
extent of public readings, and in a sufficient range of 
dramatic performances and poetical composition to 
prove that in the former he would have been a 
master and in the latter positively successful. 

Arithmetic cannot estimate imagination ; yet it is 
a striking sum total, that Mr. Dickens has repre- 
sented in his stories and sketches about fourteen 
hundred and twenty-five difi'erent personages. 

The naturalness, truth, and force of his creations 
is shown by the fact that he has already been a 
chief fountain of phrases and characters and allu- 



PEIVATE LIFE, TKAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 197 

sions m English thought and speech for thirty-five 
years. Our current literature is spiced and tinged 
with his personages and his phraseology. " Weller- 
isnis," in their day, were simply the prevailing form 
and vehicle of humor. In books, periodicals, news- 
papers, speeches — in daily home and friendly conver- 
sations — appear Pickwick, the Wellers, Mr. Stiggins, 
Mrs. Gamp, and Mr. Harris ; Mr. Tapley and Mr. 
Micawber ; Little Nell, Oliver Twist, the Cheeryble 
Brothers, Mr. Bumble, Mr. Mantalini, Fagin and 
Sikes and Nancy; Mr. Squeers and Smike, Pecksnifi" 
and Chadband, Mr. Swiveller and the Marchioness, 
Mrs. Jellyby and Borrioboola Gha, Mr. Turvey- 
drop and Mr. Boythurn and Miss Flite ; Aunt Trot- 
wood and Mr. Dick, Little Emily and Mr. Barkis, 
Tom Pinch and Mr. Montague Trigg, Miss Nipper 
and Dot, Mr. Skenton and Cousin Deerix, Mr. Wem- 
mick and Mr. Megg, Captain Cuttle and Mrs. Brus- 
by and Mrs. F's Aunt — really we might almost call 
the roll of the whole fourteen hundred. 

Public uselessness is described as How not to 
do It, and its machinery as the Circumlocution 
Ofiice ; Oliver asking for more stands for any 
helpless victim of organized abuse in the form of a 
benefaction. " A Pickwickian sense" is more famil- 
iar than its serious equivalent. Good advice, and 
bad too, are interpreted by the sage comment that 
" the bearings of this observation lays in the appli- 
cation in it," and whatever we seek, we are told to 
*' when found, make a note of" Is a consent given, 
in politics or friendship or business as well as in love ? 
— *' Barkis is willin'." Is life and its experiences heavy 



198 CHARLES DICKENS. 

on any sonl ? — " My life is one dem'd horrid grind," 
says the discouraged one, and " its all a muddle." 
Either despair or a shower furnishes forth " a dem'd, 
damp, moist, unpleasant body." Whatever you 
prefer, from pineapple rum to the presidency is 
" your partickler wanity." Any incredulity about 
anybody occasions you to say that you "don't 
believe there's no sich a person." Do you rebel 
against anything? — Your declaration of independ- 
ence is, "Don't try no impogician on the Nuss, 
for she will not abear it." Do you intimate acqui- 
escence? — "My constant mortar is, I'm easy 
pleased." Do you want to be let to have your own 
way and choice ? — " Put the bottle on the chimley- 
piece, and let me put my lips to it when I am so dis- 
poged." Are you indifterent, or are you hurt either? 
— " Oh, it's of no consequence !" Would you re- 
mind some delinquent ? — you intimate a knowledge 
of "his tricks and his manners." Would you call 
somebody to order? — "Let us have no mean- 
dering !" Do you want to be thought better of 
than another ? — " Codlin's the friend, not Shorts." 
Would some fair lady assert her faithfulness? 
-^She *' never, never will desert Mr. Micawber." 
Is a lesson of worldly prudence to be taught ? — 
The incomparable balance between happiness and 
misery is recited, defined by means of a single six- 
pence by that great authority in the ethics of 
finance. And perhaps one of the most frequently 
applicable of all, the most mordant of all, was 
the fearful unconventional pronunciamento of the 
imbecile old lady — though she might have looked 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 199 

a good while for a saying more likely to he deserved 
hy somehody or other — "I Hate a Fool !" 

Among all the striking contrasts between Dickens 
and Thackeray, none is more so than their case as to 
quotations ; none shows more strongly how true was 
the unison of the genial voice and heart of Dickens 
with those of his race ; and how disjoined and soli- 
tary was Thackeray. While Dickens has enriched the 
English language with a whole literature of johrases 
and quotations, Thackeray has not furnished one. A 
prose cento out of Dickens could easily be made to 
supply the whole conversation of a family or a com- 
pany, and a pretty intelligent and witty one too. But 
we never repeat a phrase nor a word of Thackeray. 

Dickens is objective, and not subjective ; his work 
was to deal with things without him, not to ana- 
lyze his own consciousness. Closely connected with 
this objective quality is the perfect unconsciousness 
with which his stories are told. Like a mirror, he 
receives the image of an object and reflects it again 
without any union of himself with it. You can 
read novel after novel by Dickens without thinking 
about hini at all, until you remember to admire the 
man whose work you have been enjoying. The 
characters move and speak; the author is out of 
sight. In Thackeray's' books there is scarcely a page 
where the author is not forced on the reader's atten- 
tion. He hardly pretends to stand back from among 
his puppets, and he can hardly let one of them 
speak a word, or do a thing, without croaking a 
moral chorus ; it was not without reason that he 
called his own books "dismal preachments." When 



200 CHARLES DICKENS. 

Mr. Dickens began to write, it was from a pure and 
unmingled instinct to describe the human nature 
that he saw. This w^as always the main thread and 
motive and vehicle in his books, whatever else there 
was. In the " Sketches" and in " Pickwick" there is 
no attempt to do anything else. Purposeful reform- 
atory campaigning began with " Oliver Twist," and 
thenceforward many of his novels were reformatory 
works. All of them, whether with this secondary 
character or not, were novels of human character. 
Whatever of plot, adventure, or history there was, 
was of no higher grade of importance than a third 
one, subordinate both to the invariable plenum of 
character-painting, and to the occasional superadded 
object of reforming something. 

The objects aimed at in the militant part of Mr. 
Dickens's labors may be described collectively as 
abuses. He did not, like Thackeray, assault any 
social order as such. Reading Thackeray leaves the 
impression that the English nobility are character- 
istically fools and villains. Reading Dickens may 
give an impression that the nobility are no more fit 
to govern than other people ; but not that they are 
in any w^ay particularly worse than other people. But 
there are things against which Dickens inspires his 
reader with a profound disgust and hatred. They 
are always social phenomena wrongfully permitted 
by a careless public, and injuring the helpless or the 
ignorant. In no single case of the least importance 
will that description fail. It applies to the Circum- 
locution Office, to the Court of Chancery, to the 
Debtors' Prison, to the Union Workhouse, to all 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 201 

manner of spurious philanthropists and hypocritical 
pretenders to goodness, to the Yorkshire cheap 
schools, to brutal hospital nurses, to organized or 
individual business swindlers, to vulgar abusive 
newspapers, to negro slavery, to duels, to rascally 
American land speculators, to the stone-hearted cap- 
italist who grinds the life out of his mill-hands, to 
the impudent ugliness of railroad officials. 

In nothing whatever does Mr. Dickens show such 
immense, intense, vivid force, as in these attacks upon 
strong abuses, for the behalf of those wdio cannot 
defend themselves. And if the deep wrath and 
scorn and powerful will were not sufficiently evi- 
denced of themselves in the printed words, they are 
so by the simple fact that abuses attacked by Mr. 
Dickens have been destroyed by him. Not all of 
them ; but enough to give him an actual and envi- 
able pre-eminence over all the other novelists in the 
world. The Yorkshire schools he killed as it were 
with one sweep of a scythe ; the law reforms set on 
foot by Brougham and Lyndhurst are, it has been 
stated, distinctly traceable to his writings. Mrs. 
Gamp and Mrs. Prigg have followed Mrs. Harris into 
non-existence ; debtors no longer starve in prison. 
And besides these particular instances, a great share 
of the public attention which has during Mr. Dick- 
ens's career been steadily more and more concentra- 
ted upon all the classes of institutions which he 
exposed, must be credited to his constant and pow- 
erful influence upon public opinion. 

While Mr. Dickens was totally unaffected, and 
without conceit, he was pleasantly conscious of his 
9* 



202 CHARLES DICKENS. 

powers — a state of mind very often and very wrong- 
fully confounded with conceit or pride. If he ex- 
pressed any particular pride, it was much more 
likely to be about his ability to work long and hard, 
than about his power to create works of imagination. 
And he could unaffectedly enjoy any enjoyable inci- 
dent arising out of liis reputation or writings. Pie 
used to like to tell how, travelling in Italy, he visited 
a certain monastery, and was conducted over the 
building by a young monk who, though a native 
of the country, spoke remarkably fluent English. 
There was, however, one peculiarity about his pro- 
nunciation. He frequently misplaced his v'sand w's. 
" Have you been in England ?" asked Mr. Dickens. 
"No," replied the monk, "I have learnt my English 
from this book," producing " Pickwick," and it fur- 
ther appeared that he had selected Mr. Samuel Wel- 
ler as the heau ideal of elegant pronunciation. 

And an admirer tells the following little story of 
his jolly recognition of one of the best pieces of his 
own fun: 

"I had to leave Yentnor for London, and taking 
the four-horse coach for Ryde, which is opposite to 
Portsmouth, and about fourteen miles distant from 
Ventnor, I unexpectedly found myself a fellow-trav- 
eller with Dickens. Seated beside him, I spent a 
pleasant hour listening to the exuberance of his 
imagination, until we arrived at the village of Lake. 
It was pouring with rain, and we were outside pas- 
sengers. A lady of the name of Harris had booked 
her passage in the coach. It stopped at the house 
where Mrs. Harris was supposed to reside. The 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 203 

guard got down and gave a tremendous rap at the 
door. The servant came, in her pattens, and inquired 
what he wanted. * Mrs. Harris,' shouted the guard ; 
* and the coach can't stop,' he continued. The ser- 
vant girl was amazed. 'There is no Mrs. Harris 
lives here,' she said. 'Yes, there is,' he replied, 
' and if she is not quick the coach will go without 
her.' But there was no Mrs. Harris to be found in 
the village of Lake. I turned round to Dickens and 
said : ' I never did believe that there ever was a Mrs. 
Harris, did you?' And Dickens roared with laugh- 
ter. The incident put him in the best of spirits, and 
the genial joyousness that he exhibited is pleasant 
to remember." 

There is a pleasant and touching friendliness and con- 
fidence in this passage of his speech at Boston, on his 
first visit to this country, though of a soberer color: 

"There is one other point connected with the 
labors (if I may call them so) that you hold in such 
generous esteem, to which I cannot help adverting. 
I cannot help expressing the delight, the more than 
happiness, it was to me to find so strong an interest 
awakened on this side of the water in favor of that 
little heroine of mine, to whom your President has 
made allusion, who died in her youth. I had letters 
about that child in England, from the dwellers in 
log-huts among the morasses, and swamps, and 
densest forests, and deep solitudes of the far West. 
Many a sturdy hand, hard with the axe and spade, 
and browned by the summer's sun, has taken up the 
pen and written to me a little history of domestic 
joy or sorrow, always coupled, I am proud to say, 



204 CHARLES DICKENS. 

with something of interest in that little tale, or some 
comfort or happiness derived from it ; and the writer 
has always addressed me, not as a writer of books 
for sale, resident some four or five thousand miles 
away, but as a friend to w^hom he might freely 
impart the joys and sorrows of his own fireside. 
Many a mother — I could reckon them now by 
dozens, not by units — has done the like; and has 
told me how she lost such a child at such a time, 
and w^here she lay buried, and how good she was, 
and how, in this or that respect, she resembled Nell. 
I do assure you that no circumstance of my life has 
given me one hundi-edth part of the gratification I 
have derived from this source. I was wavering at 
the time whether or not to wind up my clock and 
come and see this country; and this decided me. I 
feel as if it were a positive duty, as if I were bound 
to pack up my clothes and come and see my friends, 
and even now I have such an odd sensation in con- 
nection with these things that you have no chance 
of spoiling me. I feel as though we were agreeing — ■ 
so indeed we are, if we substitute for fictitious char- 
acters the classes from which they are drawn — about 
third parties, in whom we had, a common interest. 
At every new act of kindness on your part, I say it 
to myself: That's for Oliver — I should not wonder 
if that was meant for Smike — I have no doubt that it 
was intended for Nell; and so became much hap- 
pier, certainly, but a more sober and retiring man 
than ever I was before." 

It follows from the nature of the method wdiich 
Mr. Dickens instinctively pursued, that he w^as 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 205 

orio;inal. The sliallow charo;es that he imitated 
Irving and others, have been referred to, rather as 
matter of history or curiosity, than as needing any 
refutation. Some of Mr. Dickens's admirers or com- 
mentators have however described him as a disciple 
of, or as influenced by, Mr. Thomas Carlyle. This is 
a great error. No doubt Mr. Dickens admired Mr. 
Carlyle, for he said so ; but neither his tone of mind, 
his choice of subject-matter, the lessons he taught, 
nor the language in which he taught them, have 
any color of imitation or following of Mr. Carlyle. 
If he used them at all in literature, it was not as a 
shining example, but as an awful warning. How 
could it be otherwise? Dickens thinks well of 
humanity, and Carlyle ill; one loves men and 
women, the other despises them ; one is happy, and 
rays out happiness ; the other is miserable, and rays 
out misery and gloom. Indeed, even if it were to be 
admitted that Carlyle was a leader, a giant, a Avhole 
generation ago, he is greatly changed. Like Lance- 
lot at the tomb of Guenevere, he must have shrunk 
more than a cubit from mere grief. Now, and for years 
past, he has been far more like a dwarf than a giant. 
He is distorted, morose, and malign ; strong, no 
doubt, and not without an occasional capricious 
gleam of kind feeling ; but it is the kindness of the 
unhappy Black Dwarf of Mucklestane Moor, fitful 
and untrustworthy, and liable at any instant to turn 
into insane howls and wild threats and hateful 
execrations upon all his race. 

There are some interesting accounts of Mr. Dickens's 
habits in gathering his materials. The persons who 



'206 CHARLES DICKENS. 

sat to him for many of his characters are known, 
and no one who has ever made likenesses with pen 
or pencil can help knowing that Mr. Dickens's 
method was to have seen, and if possible studied, the 
individual whom he drew. Thus, it is said, Mrs. 
Bardell was drawn from a living portrait; she was 
a Mrs. Ann Ellis, who kept an eating-house near 
Doctors' Commons. Mr. Snodgrass, in his principal 
characteristics, and even the description of his per- 
sonal appearance, was at once accepted as a carica- 
ture of a Mr. Winters, a noimeau riche^ who might 
be seen in the season, every afternoon at three 
o'clock, ogling the ladies in the Ladies' Mile in 
the Park, and in the summer at Cheltenham, Bath, 
and the fashionable watering places. The "Fat 
Boy" was acknowledged to be sketched from the 
servant of a gate-keeper in Essex, on the London 
and Chelmsford road. The Cheeryble Brothers 
were Messrs. William and Daniel Grant of Man- 
chester; Sir John Chester was meant for Lord 
Chesterfield ; Mr. Boythorn was Landor ; Mr. Skim- 
pole, Leigh Hunt (though it has been denied that 
anything more than a mere external resemblance 
was meant) ; Mr. Pecksniff (it is said) Mr. S. C. 
Hall ; David Copperfield himself (not in any com- 
plete sense however) ; Wilkins Micawber, his own 
father, whose obligations the novelist himself paid 
up ; and so on. 

In like manner he watched sharply for names 
suitable for his purpose ; when he saw a strange or 
odd name on a shop-board, or in walking through a 
village or country town, he entered it in his pocket- 



PEIVATE LIFE, TEAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 207 

book and added it to his reserve list. Then, runs 
the story, when lie wanted a striking surname for a 
new character, he had but to take the first half of one 
real name, and to add to it the second half of 
another, to produce the exact effect upon the eye 
and ear of the reader he desired. 

Of his discovery of the name of the immortal 
" Pickwick," the following sprightly account is given : 

" Many works had just been issued with either the 
name of the author appearing on the title-page under 
the guise of editor, or, when they were from the 
pens of unknown writers, under the editorial spon- 
sorship of well-known authors, and it was decided 
that the new book should follow in the wake, and it 
consequently appeared as ' edited by Boz.' The title 
was written out by Mr. Chapman, and was scarcely 
altered except in the leading word, that of ' Nimrod' 
having, as Mr. Dickens asserts, been first proposed. 
A better name was soon found. Mr. Dickens rushed 
into the publishers' office one day, exclaiming, with 
evident delight, ' I've got it, Moses Pickwick, Bath- 
coachman.' He had just seen painted on the door 
of a stage-coach that was passing along the street 
the name and address * Moses Pickwick & Co., 
Bath,' that worthy firm being the proprietors of a 
line of stages running from the great metropolis to 
the well-known seat of fashion in the West of 
England. Ten or fifteen years later the present 
writer witnessed the same inscription painted on 
coach doors in the ancient city of Bath, to the 
neighborhood of which Mr. Pickwick's enterprise 
had been then confined by the encroachments of the 



208 CHARLES DICKENS. 

steam -horse. And so with the first name, Moses, 
changed to Samuel, originated the cognomen of a 
character whose fame is co-extensive with the English 
language." 

The name is the more fortunate, since the pick- 
ing, poking office of the old-fashioned little candle- 
correcting instrument called a " pickwick" possessed 
'a close analogy with the particular sort of scientific 
inquisitiveness required in developing the " Theory 
of Tittlebats," and in similar researches. 

Any one who will search a little for himself will 
find abundant evidence of the reality of this appar- 
ently fantastic nomenclature. Guppy was not long 
ago a passenger on a Liverpool steamer, Ginery 
Dunkle is not as strange a name as Ginery Twitch- 
ell's, who was not long ago a member of a high legis- 
lative body in these United States, and who is a 
"railroad man" of considerable fame. Nor is it 
very long since Miss Rose Budd was married in New 
England, to a clergyman and gentleman of culture 
and eminence, though her namesake Rosa Bud will 
never marry either Edwin Drood or Neville Landless. 

It is worth recording that Mr. Dickens wrote just 
about one novel in two years. In his prefaces he 
repeatedly names that or nearly that period as 
having been used on some one book. His fourteen 
principal novels, beginning w^th "Pickwick" and 
ending with " Our Mutual Friend," appeared during 
just twenty-eight years, from 1836-7 to 1864-5. 
This order of production reminds one of the law, 
well known to physiologists and genealogists, that a 
mother should bear children not oftener than once 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 209 

in two years. Many a genealogy will show" list after 
list of eight or ten or even more children of the 
same fruitful old Puritan matron, dating regularly 
every odd or even year. And by a further coinci- 
dence, it was after having produced his first five 
novels in five years that Mr. Dickens found himself 
overworked, and took a vacation. 

If space and time permitted, it would be interests 
ing and profitable to trace the contrasts and similar- 
ities between Dickens and his great predecessors, 
Scott and Irving ; his other predecessors, Theodore 
Hook and Bulwer ; his great contemporaries, Thack- 
eray and Hood ; his other contemporaries, Collins, 
]>ronte, Elizabeth Sheppard, Mrs. Lewes, and others ; 
his imitator (in the reform line), Charles Reade. 
Other instructive lessons would follow from com- 
paring him, not with authors, but w^ith such artists 
as Hogarth and Cruikshank; with dramatists, and 
wdth poets. But all this must be omitted. 

A few negatives of Mr. Dickens's works should be 
noticed. There is (so to speak) no learned element 
in them ; no antiquarianism, no labored history no 
reference, nor allusions nor mottoes nor quotations 
nor citations by chapter and verse, nor notes nor 
glossaries. There is no attempt at serious eloquence, 
unless the passages of inapassioned description are 
to be called such ; no bon mots nor puns nor jokes, 
such as constitute the anecdotes of Tallyrand and 
Jerrold ; no systematized mental or moral philoso- 
phy ; no intentional analysis of character; no use of 
animal magnetism, spiritism, or any of their cog- 
nate phenomena; no dialects whatever, unless the 



210 CHAELES DICKENS. 

Americanisms, the broken English of a few foreign- 
ers, and the Cockney speech of London be counted 
exceptions ; not a single Scotch person ; one Welsh 
woman (Mrs. Woodcourt), and not one Irish per- 
son, except a servant-girl, and one character in one of 
the Sketches ; neither, however, marked by dialect. 

To deliver a critical estimate of the good qualities 
which Dickens had, would be a responsible, difficult, 
and notably thankless task. Very few indeed are 
those who do not lind in his books something to 
enjoy ; and each values most in him what he indi- 
vidually relishes most. Some love his pathos, some 
his humor, some his humanitarian labors. The 
pathetic children, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, and 
Paul Dombey, have perhaps been most popular of 
all his characters, the first most ; though some be- 
lieve that the second was the author's own favorite. 
For another class of minds, his humorous characters 
are beyond comparison the most enjoyable ; such as 
the Wellers, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber. The 
personages with whom he was least successful were 
what may be called his goodies ; and perhaps his 
heroes and heroines must be ranked among these. 
This is however an almost universal condition of 
novel writing. In the heart and centre of the whirl 
and maze of the characters, it seems as if there 
were of necessity in every novel, as in the middle of 
a typhoon, a motionless, empty pivot-space, in itself 
insignificant and vapid, but in some way indispensa- 
ble for the mechanism of the actually moving parts. 
It maybe added that very many of his Americanisms 
in the " Notes," " Martin Chuzzlewit," and " Mugby 



PRIVATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 211 

Junction," are not such as can be discovered in ac- 
tual life. Among his books, his own preference was 
"David Copperfield ;" Mr. Thackeray's little girl 
preferred '' Nicholas Nickleby;" many choose " Oliver 
Twist," very many " Pickwick," and there is at least 
one person who likes best the " Tale of Two Cities." 
There have been a few positive dislikers and dis- 
approvers of Dickens. These might perhaps be 
classed as philosophers and Stigginses. A specimen 
of the latter variety has been referred to. The 
former, it will be found, disapprove or despise novels, 
as such, on principle; and if they dislike novels there 
is nothing to be said against them. It is no fault of 
theirs. Some very worthy and useful people have 
disliked roses, and straw^berries, and music. There 
is no danger that the world will be overrun with 
such mental deformities, any more than that the 
human race will become hunchbacked. Mr. Emerson 
may perhaps be taken as an instance of these wise 
men ; for though he does not avow that he despises 
all novels, the reasons he gives for despising some 
will be found to force him to despise all— or would 
be if Mr. Emerson made use of principle. In de- 
scribing what he apprehends to be the too practical, 
unphilosophic, narrow, and ungeneralizing habits of 
the English mind, Mr. Emerson attributes the same 
traits to their belles-lettres literature, as well as to 
the rest of their mental products, and to Dickens by 
name among the rest. He says : 

" The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day 
have the like municipal limits. Dickens, with pre- 
ternatural apprehension of the language of manners, 



212 > CHAELES DICKENS. 

and the varieties of street life, with pathos and laugh- 
ter, with patriotic and still enlarging generosity, 
writes London tracts. He is a painter of English 
details, like Hogarth ; local and temporary in his 
tints and style, and local in his aims." 

With this utter failure to even see what the prob- 
lem of this novelist is, what his capacities are to 
solve it, or what he has actually done toward a solu- 
tion, it is natural enough that Mr. Emerson should 
dispose of the whole brotherhood of present English 
romance writers with one sweeping sentence, giving 
two other specimens to show how worthless a com- 
pany they are. 

"Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional 
ability, is distinguished for his reverence of intellect 
as a temporality, and appeals to the worldly ambition 
of the student. His romances tend to fan these low 
flames. Their [the English] novelists despairof the 
heart. Thackeray finds that God has made no 
allowance for the poor thing in his universe ; more's 
the pity, he thinks ; — but 'tis not for us to be wiser : 
we must renounce ideals, and accept London." 

But Mr. Emerson's mission is to advocate what he 
supposes to be the truest utilitarianism, in a manner 
which shall give him the benefit of the freest imag- 
inativeness. Given over to the exemplification of 
one vast paradox, it is no wonder that he has so 
totally failed to understand the successful uniofi in 
Mr. Dickens of the qualities which in himself mingle 
only, like the clay and iron in the feet of Nebuchad- 
nezzar's image, to make his mental structure un- 
stable. 



PKIYATE LIFE, TRAITS, AND ANECDOTES. 213 

A single observation upon Mr. Dickens's method 
will be more suggestive and useful than any assump- 
tion of an exhaustive analysis of and judgment upon 
him. It is this : that his method was always dra- 
matic^ — theatrical. His love for the drama and his 
own remarkable dramatic gifts, have been sufficiently 
described ; but the extent to wdiich he systematically 
used a theatrical method in developing his charac- 
ters and their action might easily escape notice. It 
was not occasionally, but naturally and uncon- 
sciously and always, that he produced his impres- 
sions in the theatrical manner (the word is used as 
a definition, not as an imputation) ; that is, by ex- 
aggerating gesture, voice, or trait of character to 
such an extent that no individual of a great audience 
could fail to see and hear. His bad people are 
worse, his good people better, his silly people sillier, 
his children more gigantically childlike (putting 
adult thoughts in a childlike manner), his funny 
people funnier, than those who can be seen. It is 
not meant by this that probability or keeping is sur- 
rendered, for it is not ; all that is meant is, that 
such a modification of proportions is made as a 
painter uses who changes the proportions of light 
and shade to increase the effect of a picture ; or an 
actor who, in expressing anger or fear, moves his 
features more, and articulates more painstakingly, 
and speaks with a greater volume of tone, so that 
the furthest spectator may hear and see. 

Mr. Dickens is to be estimated among that small 
class of rare and great geniuses who have produced 
what was of high intrinsic excellence, who have pro- 



214 CHARLES DICKENS. 

duced much, and whose labors have been greatly- 
acceptable, because in harmony with the spirit of 
their age. He gave very great pleasure, and he did 
great good. He has not written a wicked word, and 
he has written many volumes of good ones. He 
has never encouraged nor justified nor beautified 
revenge nor falsehood, impurity nor crime, nor sin. 
He has invariably and powerfully presented them as 
evils and unhappinesses, and has shown virtue to be 
its own reward, and to be likely, moreover, to win 
all other desirable rewards. He was by vocation a 
great realist delineator of the human nature around 
him — sympathetic, kindly, loving good, hating and 
fighting evil ; equally a master of the pathetic and 
the humorous, the terrible, the grotesque, and the 
kindly. He was a great Force — self made, laborious, 
energetic, and of immense executive ability ; a great 
Truth — seeing, understanding, and interpreting ; a 
great Good — giving pleasure and not pain, power- 
fully helping the Right and combating the Wrong. 
He was the greatest English humorist, the second 
greatest English novelist (for Scott must be given 
the first place), and, beyond all comparison, the- 
greatest novelist-reformer of any age. 



CHAPTER V. 
Dickens: bt Henri Taine. 

[Chap, I. of the 5th and concluding volume of Taine's History of 
English Lite?'a(nre.] 

I.-THE WRITER. 

1. Relation to each other of the different elements of an author's tal- 
ent. Importance of the faculty of imagination. 

2. Clearness and intensity of the imagination in Dickens. His fancy 
audacious and vehement. Inanimate objects, with him, become person- 
ified, and take on passions. How his conceptions approach to intui- 
tions. How they approach monomania. His representations of persons 
under delusions, and of the insane. 

3. The favorite objects of his enthusiasm. His trivialities and minu- 
tiae. How he resembles the English painters. Difference between him 
and George Sand. Ruth Pinch and Genevieve. His stage-coach ride. 

4. The strong, emotions produced by his species of imagination. His 
pathetic representations. The operative, Stephen Blackpool. His comic 
side. He runs into buffoonery and caricature. The extravagance and 
exaggerated excitement of his gayety. 

n.— THE PUBLIC. 

1. The English novelist is required to be moral. How this condition 
modifies ideas of love. Love with George Sand, and with Dickens. The 
young girl and the wife. 

2. How this condition modifies the idea of passion. Passion in Balzac 
and in Dickens. 

3. Inconveniences of this necessity. Comic or odious masks substi- 
tuted for natural personages. Pecksniff and Tartufe. Why, with Dick- 
ens, his story as a whole is deficient in action. 

III.-PERSONAGES. 

1. Two classes of personages. Natural, instinctive characters. Arti- 
ficial and "practical" characters. Dickens prefers the former. His 
aversion for the latter. 



216 CHARLES DICKENS. 

2. Hypocrites. Pecksniff. His English peculiarities. Compared with 
Tartufe. The " practicaP'' man, Gradgrind. The proud man, Dombey. 
The English peculiarities of these characters. 

3. Children. French literature without them. The Joash of Eacine, 
and David Copperfield. The common people. 

4. Dickens's ideal man. Correspondence of this ideal with a public 
want. Opposition in England between education and nature. Advo- 
cacy of sensibility and instinct, as against the oppressions of conven- 
tionality and rules. Success of Dickens. 



miRODUCTORY NOTE. 



If Dickens were dead, his biography could be written. The 
day after an eminent man is buried, his friends and enemies go 
straight to work ; his old school-fellows send accounts to the news- 
papers of his boyish escapades. Another recalls, word for word, 
the conversations he has held with the dead for twenty-five years. 
His executor publishes a list of his diplomas and dignities, with 
dates and details, and gives the history of his investments and his 
fortune. His grand-nephews and second cousins describe his kind 
deeds, and make a catalogue of his domestic virtues. If there is 
no relative who possesses the requisite literary ability, some Ox- 
ford graduate is employed — a conscientious and learned man — 
who proceeds to deal wath the deceased as if he were a Greek clas- 
sic. He accumulates an infinity of documents, piles an infinity of 
comments on these, rounding off the whole with aji infinity of 
dissertations, and some Christmas day, ten years afterward, he 
comes \dth a white cravat and a calm smile to present to the as- 
sembled family a biography, in three volumes quarto, of eight 
hundred pages each, Avhose lighter portions would put asleep a 
Berlin German. They w^elcome him with tears of joy; he is put 
in the place of honor, and his work is sent to the Edinburgh Reviein. 
The editor, terrified at the enormous parcel, hands it over to some 
intrepid young reviewer, who makes out some sort of biographical 
sketch, by the help of the table of contents. Such posthumous 
biographies have this particular advantage : that the deceased is 
uot in a position to contradict either reviewer or biographer. 



CHARLES DICKENS. 217 

Dickens, unfortunately, is still living* to contradict his biogra- 
phers. Worse still, he means to be his own biographer. One of 
his translators having on one occasion applied to him for certain 
documents, he answered that he should keep them to le used by 
himself. No doubt " David Copperfield," the best of his roman- 
ces, has the air of a confidential disclosure ; but where does this 
stop? What defines the limit between fiction and truth'? All 
that we know — or rather, all that we can say — is, that Dickens 
was born in 1812; was the son of a short-hand reporter; became 
a short-hand reporter himself; was hard pressed by poverty in his 
youth ; and that his romances, which he had issued serially, have 
gained him a large fortune and an immense reputation. Anybody 
may conjecture for himself whatever else he likes. Mr. Dickens 
will give his own version of his own story some day, whenever he 
shall write his own memoirs. Until that time his doors are shut, 
and over-inquisitive searchers are left to knock in vain. He has 
of course a perfect right to this line of conduct. The fact that he 
is celebrated does not make him the property of the public. 
There is no obligation to impart his confidence. He belongs to 
himself, and is perfectly at liberty to keep to himself whatever he 
chooses. Because he puts his books into the hands of his readers^ 
it does not follow that he must do the same with his own life. 
Let us content ourselves with what he has given us. Forty volumes 
are enough, and more than enough, to acquaint us with the au- 
thor. They- will certainly give us all that we have any business to 
know about him. It is not the accidental occurrences of his life 
which belong to history — it is his genius, and this is in his works. 
A man's genius is like a watch; it is an assemblage of parts, one 
of which is the main-spring. We can begin with this, and show 
how it causes the movements of .the whole train, following from 
one wheel to another, imtil we come to the hands at the end. 
This inner history of the mind has no necessary connection with 
the external history of the mind, though it is of much greater 
value. 

*The secor,d edition of M. Taiue's volume is dated 1S69. 



1. THE WRITER. 

The first question to be asked about an artist is, 
of what quality is his power of vision ? How dis- 
tinct, how keen, how powerful are his imaginations? 
The answer to this inquiry will define his method 
in advance ; for he is using his imagination in every 
line he writes, and he will maintain to the end the 
same manner which he has at the beginning. 
The answer will describe his talent too ; for in a 
novelist, the imagination is the controlling faculty. 
His artistic skill as a writer, his taste, his perception 
of truth, all depend on this. A single additional 
deacree of imao^inative vehemence w^ill disoro-anize 
his style, change his character, and confound his 
plans. If we study the imagination of Dickens, we 
shall find in it the source of both his defects and his 
merits, of his powers and his excesses. 

1. 

Dickens contains a painter — and an English 
painter. Nobody, I believe, ever represented with 
more exact detail and greater force all the forms 
and colors of a picture. Read his description of a 
storm: you see, as it were, impressions daguerreo- 
typed by the blinding flash of its lightning.* An 

* " The eye, partaking of the qitickness of the flashing light, saw 
in its every gleam a mnltitnde of objects which it could not see 
at steady noon in fifty times that jjeriod. Bells in steeples, with 
the rope and wheel that moved them ; ragged nests of birds in 
cornices and nooks," etc. — Martin Chuzzlewit. 



M. taine's analysis. 219 

imagination so lucid and so forceful might be ex- 
pected to vivify inanimate objects with perfect ease. 
It arouses extraordinary emotion within the mind 
where it is at work ; and the author pours out upon 
tlie thin2:s he describes somethino- of the overflowing 
passion that burdens him. He gives a voice to 
stones ; blank walls stretch out into vast phantoms ; 
black pits yawn hideously and mysteriously in the 
darkness; legions of strange beings whirl and quiver 
over all the fancy-haunted fields ; all nature is filled 
with living things; all matter takes on a living 
quality. Yet these images are all distinct ; in 
these fantasies nothing is vague or disorderly ; imag- 
inary objects are represented with outlines as precise, 
with details as full, as real ones ; the visions are 
equivalent to realities. 

There is in particular one description of a wild, 
powerful night-wind which recalls some passages of 
" Notre Dame de Paris." This, like all Dickens's 
descriptions, comes wholly from the imagination. 
He never describes, as Walter Scott does, in order to 
supply his reader with a map, — to furnish a topo- 
graphical locality for his story. Nor does he ever 
describe, as Byron does, from a love of the magnifi- 
cence of nature ; to display a splendid series of 
grand pictures. His object is neither exactitude 
nor beauty. He is simply struck with some unex- 
pected sight, is excited by it, and bursts out in a 
spontaneous description. Now it is fallen leaves 
chased by the wind, flying before it, tumbling over 
each other, tossed, scared, losing their way, hiding 
in furrows, drowning themselves in ditches, perching 



220 CHARLES DICKENS. 

in trees.* Now it is the night-wind sweeping round 
and round a church, groaning, and trying with its in- 
visible hand windows and doors, — insinuating itself 
into every crevice, and when it has got itself en- 
closed in the stony prison, wailing and howling to 
get out again. f For a while, all this is only the 
sombre imagination of the truth. But a little 
further, and we perceive the passionate religious 
sentiment of a revolutionary Protestant ; when he 
speaks of its seeming " to chant, in its wild way, of 
Wrong and Murder done, and false Gods wor- 
shipped." But the artist quickly returns upon us; he 
takes us up into the steeple, and envelopes us in a 
jingle of words that give us the sensation of being 
carried up in a whirlwind. The wind whistles and 
flings about the arches and loopholes, and grim old 
turrets ; it twists and twines about the giddy stair, 
and twirls the groaning weathercock. He has seen 
every part and item of the old steeple ; his mind is 
like a mirror; neither the minutest nor the ugliest 
detail escapes it. He has taken account of every 
old rust-eaten iron rail, every shrivelled sheet of 
lead that crackles and heaves beneath the unaccus- 
tomed tread, the shabby nests stuffed into corners of 
mouldy beams, the accumulations of gray dust, the 
speckled spiders, indolent and fat with long security, 
that swing idly to and fro in the vibration of the 

* " It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking 
its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves," etc. 
— Miirtin Chuzzlewit. 

t " For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round 
and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes," etc 
— The Chimes. 



M. TAINE's analysis. 221 

bells. Such descriptions subject us to their illusion. 
Suspended there on high between the flying clouds 
whose shadows are sweeping over the town below, 
and the feeble light, hardly visible through the 
gloom, we feel a sort of dizziness, and easily imagine, 
as Dickens did, an intelligence and a living soul in 
the metallic voices of the bells that inhabit the vibrat- 
ing fastness. 

Upon these bells he has founded a romance ; and 
he has made others in a like manner. For Dickens 
is a poet. He is as much at houie in the imaginary 
world as in the real. Now the Chimes commune 
with the poor old ticket-porter at the corner, and 
console him. Again, it is the Cricket on the Hearth 
that sings of domestic joys, and recalls to the mind 
of the desolate master of the house the happy 
evenings, the confidential intercourses, the comfort, 
the quiet gayety that he has enjoyed there, but pos- 
sesses no more. Again, the story is of a sickly and 
precocious child who feels that he is dying, and as 
he slumbers in his sister's arms, hears the distant 
song of the murmuring waves that lull him. With 
Dickens, inanimate things take the color of the 
thoughts of his personages. His imagination is so 
vivid and eager that it carries everything along 
with it as it goes. If one of his personages is happy, 
the clouds and the flowers are happy too, if miser- 
able, all nature must sorrow with him. Everything 
has a voice, even down to the houses of vulgar 
streets. The current of the writer's thoughts passes 
through a swarm of visions; and sometimes carries 
him into the strangest fantasies. Thus, a pretty, 



222 CHARLES DICKENS. 

simple-hearted young girl is crossing Fountain 
Court and the Temple, on her way to meet her 
brother. Could anything be more simple? — more 
vulgar, if you please ? But Dickens bestows abun- 
dant emotion on the occasion. To do her honor, he 
calls in birds, trees, the fountain, the lawyers' offices, 
their files of papers, and abundance of other things. 
It is foolish — but it is almost an enchantment.* The 
passage is forced, is it not? Our French taste, 
habituated to moderation, is revolted by these ac 
cesses of affectation and unnatural conceits. Yet the 
affectation is entirely natural ; Dickens does not go 
aside to seek such things ; he finds them in his way. 
His imagination, active to excess, is like the string of an 
instrument drawn too tight; it produces, without any 
violent touch, sounds not heard under other conditions. 
Here is a specimen of the way in which this ex- 
citability is stimulated. Take, for instance, a shop ; 
no matter what, — the most repulsive you think of; 
that of a dealer in nautical instruments. Dickens 
looks upon the barometers, chronometers, compasses, 
telescopes, glasses, maps, speaking-trumpets, and so 
forth. He sees them all; so many of them, so 
distinctly ; they seem to gather to each other and 
crowd each other, that they fill and confuse his 
brain, as it were ; so many geographical and nautical 
ideas are displayed in the wiudows, suspended from 
the ceiling, hung upon the wall ; they are discharged, 

* "Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of 
Fountain Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of 
the brightest and purest-hearted little woman in the world," etc. 

— Martin Chuzzlewit. 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 223 

as it were, apon him from so many directions at 
once, and in such quantities, that he forgets where 
he is; the shop is transfigured; and "partaking of 
the general infection, seemed almost to become a 
snug, sea-going, ship-shape concern, wanting only 
good sea-room, in the event of an unexpected 
launch, to work its way securely to any desert island 
in the world." 

The distance between a lunatic and a man of ge- 
nius is not great. Napoleon, a competent authority, 
asserted this to Esquirol.* The faculty which in- 
sures us glory is that which carries us into the mad- 
man's cell. \^The creative imagination both forms the 
phantoms of the lunatic and the personages of the 
artist ; and the same classification may be applied 
to both manifestations of it. The imagination of 
Dickens resembles that of a monomaniac. Its char- 
acteristics are, to give itself wholly up to one single 
idea, to be possessed by it, to see nothing else, to 
repeat it in a hundred different forms, to exaggerate 
it, to impress it when thus exaggerated upon the 
mind of the spectator, to dazzle him and overpower 
him with it, to impress it upon him so deeply and 
permanently that he cannot escape from the recol- 
lection of it — suc^h are the leading peculiarities of 
such an imagination, of such a style. In this kind 
*' David Copperfield" is a masterpiece. Never were 
objects more plainly present before the eye and more 
firmly fixed in the recollection of the reader, than 

* " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds diAdde." 
M. Taine seems not to have known Drvden's lines. — (Tr.) 



224 CHARLES DICKENS. 

those which it describes. The old house, the parlor 
the kitchen, Mr. Peggotty's boat, and, above all, the 
courtyard of the schot)l, are interiors unequalled for 
strength of relief, force, and precision. Dickens 
possesses both the passion and the patience of the 
painters of his country. He reckons all the details 
one by one, observes the different colors of the old 
tree-trunks, perceives every old cask, every green or 
broken flagstone, every crevice in the damp walls. 
He notices even the strange smells of the place — 
just how large are the moss-grown spots. He reads 
the names of pupils written on the door, and is par- 
ticular as to the forms of the letters in them. And 
yet, for all this minuteness, there is no coldness. 
The quantity of detail is because the observation 
was intense; the exactitude proves the passion. 
VThis passionateness is felt without being realized ; 
all at once, on reaching the end of a page, it is de- 
tected. The temerities of the style betray it ; the 
violences in phraseology correspond to the vehe- 
mence of the impression. Exaggerated metaphors 
are used to suggest grotesque fancies to the mind. 
There is a sense of being beset with extravagant 
visions. Mr. Mell plays on his flute until Copperfield 
fancied that the whole of him went into the large 
hole where he blew, and passed out througli the 
keys below. Tom Pinch is undeceived, and dis- 
covers that his employer, Pecksniff", is a hypocriti- 
cal scoundrel. " He had so long been used to steep 
the Pecksniff' of his fancy in his tea, and spread him 
out upon his toast, and take him as a relish with his 
beer, that he made but a poor breakfast on the first 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 225 

morning after his expulsion." We are reminded of 
the fantasies of IIofFniann ; we fear lest we shall 
absolutely fall into some delusion ourselves. Such 
eccentricities are the mark of illness rather than of 
health. 

Dickens is equally admirable in painting halluci- 
nations. It is obvious that he partakes of those 
which he ascribes to his personages ; that he is pos- 
sessed by their ideas and enters into their notions. 
As an Englishman and a moralist, he has more than 
once described remorse. Perhaps he might justly 
be found fault with for making it such a scarecrow 
as he does ; periiaps an artist ought not to thus 
become merely an assistant to the policeman and the 
preacher. Yet the portrait of Jonas Chuzzlewit is 
so terrible, that we can pardon it for being made 
useful. Jonas has secretly gone out from his room, 
has murdered his enemy, and believes that hence- 
forward he shall sleep in peace. But the remem- 
brance of his crime, like a slow poison, insensibly 
disorganizes his mind. He can no longer govern his 
thoughts, but is hurried away by them as by the 
fury of a frightened horse. He is thinking inces- 
santly, and in terror, of the chamber at home where 
he is supposed to be asleep. He looks round the 
room, he counts the patterns of the paper, sees the 
long folds of the dark curtains, the impression which 
he left w^here he lay on the bed, the door, where 
there may be a knock at any moment. The more 
he tries to escape from his thoughts, the more they 
possess him ; they become as it were a burning gulf 
where he rolls and struggles with cries and sweats 



226 CHARLES DICKENS. 

of agony. He fancies himself lain down in the bed at 
home, where he is supposed to be ; and in an instant 
he sees himself there. He is frightened at this other 
self; and the imagination is so distinct that he is 
not sure he is not really there, in London. Thus 
" he became in a manner his own ghost and phan- 
tom." And this imaginary other self becomes a 
mirror that holds up to his conscience the picture of 
the murder and its punishment. Then he returns 
home, and in a fright creeps to the door of the 
chamber. Man of business as he is, calculator, mere 
mechanical machine for dealing with practical affairs, 
he has grown as fanciful as a nervous woman. He 
steps along on tiptoe, as if afraid of awakening that 
imaginary man in the bed. At the moment when 
he turns the key in the door a monstrous terror 
seizes him ; — suppose that the murdered man should 
be standing inside there ? At last he goes in and 
lies down in the bed, parched with fever. He draws 
the bedclothes over his eyes, to shut out the accursed 
room, and he sees it more distinctly than ever. The 
rustling of the coverings, the buzzing of an insect, 
the beatings of his own heart, all cry out to him, 
" Murderer !" Gazing with a frenzy of intense at- 
tention upon the door, he at last believes that some 
one is opening it, and hears it creak. His senses 
are astray ; he neither dares to trust them nor to 
distrust them ; and in this nightmare of hideous 
shapes that confound his reason, he feels nothing to 
be real except the ceaseless torment of his convul- 
sive despair. Then all other thoughts, all other 
dangers, all the world, are covered and hidden in 



M. TAINE's analysis. 227 

one single question — When will they find that corpse 
in the wood ? He seeks to escape from the thought, 
but it abides and clings, as if bound to him by iron 
chains. He seems all the time to be passing through 
that wood, gliding on with noiseless and furtive 
steps, putting the boughs aside ; that he draws 
nearer, nearer ; that he is " startling the very flies 
that were thickly sprinkled over it like heaps of 
dried currants." He is ever imagining the discov- 
ery ; he is watching to hear of it, listening for the 
cry and rumor in the street, hearing everybody who 
goes out or comes in, who goes up or down ; and 
yet, at the same time, he is always seeing the lonely 
corpse in the woods, pointing it out, as it were, to 
people whom he meets, as if to say, " ' Look here ! 
Do you know of this ? Is it found ? Do you sus- 
pect me ?' If he had been condemned to bear the 
body in his arms, and lay it down for recognition at 
the feet of every one he met, it could not have been 
more constantly with him, or a cause of more mo- 
notonous and dismal occupation than it was in this 
state of his mind." 

Jonas is here on the verge of madness. Others of 
Dickens's personages are actually insane. He has 
drawn three or four portraits of insane persons, 
wdiich are very amusing at first sight, but which 
are so true that as we reflect upon them they 
become horrible. To portray these disordered 
minds requires an imagination like that of Dick- 
ens, lawless, excessive, itself capable of illusions. 
Two of these pictures especially are at once laugh- 
able and terrible : Augustus, the melancholy youth 



228 CHARLES DICKENS. 

M^io is on the point of marrying Miss Pecksniff, and 
the poor Mr. Dick, half idiot and half monomaniac, 
who is living in Miss Trotwood's home. Hoifixiann 
alone equals Dickens in understanding the sudden 
excitements, sadnesses without a cause, and strange 
perversions of sensibility of such characters ; in 
describing their disjointed thoughts and discon- 
nected reasonings, the constant reappearance of 
some one word that breaks down any sentence they 
begin, and confuses what had begun to be a sensible 
observation; in seizing the senseless smile, the 
vacant look, the foolish and uneasy expression of 
these grown-up infants, painfully feeling about for 
thought after thought, and touching at every step 
upon the threshold of reality without the power of 
entering. The play of these dilapidated minds is 
painful, like the creaking of a door unhinged. A 
discordant laugh can be heard in it, if we listen for 
it ; but it is easier to hear a groan and a complaint ; 
and it is frightful to discern the lucidity, strange- 
ness, exultation, and violence of an imagination that 
could create such beings and sustain their individu- 
ality throughout and with unfailing consistency, and 
that finds itself at home in the task of imitating 
and describing their unreason. 

To what object is this force directed ? For 
imaginations diifer not in their nature only, but in 
their objects. When we have estimated their power, 
we need next to define their sphere. Within the 
whole world, the artist limits a special world for 
himself. Involuntarily, he chooses the class of 
objects which he prefers ; others fail to excite him ; 



M. IVVINES ANALYSTS. 220 

he does not even perceive them. Dickens does not 
perceive tilings that are great; and this is the 
second quality which we are to note in his imagina- 
tion. He is liable to become enthusiastic over any- 
thing, and particularly over common objects, — an 
old curiosity-shoj) ; a sign ; a public crier. He has 
vigor, but does not attain to the beautiful. His 
instrument ])roduces vibrating tones, but not harmo- 
nious sounds. If he is to describe a house, he will 
draw it Avith even geometrical distinctness ; he will 
bring out every color; he will find a physiognomy 
and thoughts even in the blinds and gutters; he 
will turn the building into a sort of human being, 
an energetic, grinning creature that we must needs 
ojaze at and cannot forsjet. But he will not see the 
nobleness of long monumental lines, the calm 
majesty of broad shadows and their contrast with 
white surfaces, the joyful beauty of the lights that 
play across them and become palpable in the dark 
depths into which they plunge, as if to rest them- 
selves and to sleep. If he is to describe a region of 
country, he will see the hawthorns whose red ber- 
ries are sprinkled along the leafless hedges, the thin 
vapor that rises above a distant brook, the moving 
of an insect in the grass ; but the large poetic 
qualities which would strike the author of "Valen- 
tine" and " Andre" will escape him. Like the paint- 
ers of his country, he will be absorbed in observing 
little things minutely and intensely, but will not 
show a love of beautiful forms or beautiful colors. 
He will not see that blue and red, a straight line 
and a curve, suffice to form immense harmonies, 



2 no CHAKLES DICKENS. 

which, even among so many various differing 
details, maintain a large serenity, and open to 
the profoundest depths of the soul a fountain of 
health and happiness. But happiness is the very 
thing that he lacks. His inspiration is a feverish im- 
pulse which does not want to select its objects, but 
acts at random, upon what is ugly, vulgar, foolish ; 
which breathes into its creations an abrupt and vio- 
lent activity, but does not endow them with the har- 
monious well-being that another hand might have 
given. Ruth Pinch is an extremely pretty little 
housekeeper. She puts on her apron ; what a treas- 
ure of an apron ! Dickens turns it over and over, 
like a clerk in a ladies' lancy clothing store, trying 
to sell it. She takes it in her hand ; she puts it round 
her waist ; she ties the strings; she spreads it down ; 
she taps it and rebukes it, and wheedles it, to make 
it set smoothly. There is hardly anything that she 
does not do with it. And how enchanted is the 
author during these innocent performances ! He 
utters little cries of mischievous delight — "Heav- 
ens, what a wicked little apron!" He apostrophizes 
her ring ; he frolics round her ; he claps his hands 
with pleasure. The fabrication of the pudding is a 
great deal worse. Out of this he manufactures a 
w^hole scene, dramatic and lyric, with exclamations, 
introduction, catastrophes, as complete as a Greek 
tragedy. These kitchen prettinesses and archnesses 
recall the contrast of George Sand's pictures of 
interiors. For instance, the chamber of the flower- 
girl Genevieve. She is making, like Ruth, some- 
thing useful, that she is to sell next day for ten 



M. TAINES ANALYSIS. 231 

sous. But this is a full-blown rose, whose delicate 
petals unclose under her fingers, as beneath a fairy's, 
whose fresh corolla is rosy with a vermilion as tender as 
that of her cheeks; a frail masterpiece, the blossom 
of an evening of poetic emotion passed in gazing 
from her window into the divine and penetrating eyes 
of the stars, and while the tirst breath of love is mur- 
muring in the depth of her virgin heart. Dickens needs 
no such picture as this to inspire him. He can com- 
pose a dithyramb on a stage-coach. The wheels, the 
splashing mud, the crack of the whip, the clatter of 
the horses' feet, the rattle of the harness and the whole 
equipage, are enough to carry him quite away. He 
feels the very motion of the vehicle ; it carries him 
off along with it; he hears the very gallop of the 
horses, and off he goes in an ode of several pages, 
which might be imagined played to us by the guard 
on his bugle.* All this, to inform us that Tom Pinch 
went to London ! This lyric effusion, in which the 
most poetic conceits spring out of the most vulgar 
commonplace, like unhealthy flowers growing out 
of some old broken pot, illustrates the whole of 
Dickens's imagination. You might paint his portrait 
in the character of a person with a saucepan in one 
hand and a coach-whip in the other, in the act 
of prophesying. 

2. 
The reader has already foreseen that an imagina- 
tion of this kind produces violent emotions. The 
manner of a man's conceptions determines his mode 
of feeling. Where the mind, only carelessly attend- 
ing, follows the indistinct outlines of a sketch, it 
* " Yohn," etc. — Martin Chuzzlewit. 



232 CHARLES DICKENS. 

receives only imperceptible impressions of pain or 
pleasure. But when with profound attention it 
penetrates all the minute details of an accurately- 
finished representation, the pain or pleasure that it 
receives take entire possession of it. Dickens has 
this attention ; he sees these details ; and thus he is 
able to find a source of excitement in anything. He 
never escapes from his impassioned tone ; never 
seeks the repose of a natural style or a simple nar- 
rative. He is always making you either laugh or 
cry ; he is always writing either satire or elegy. He 
has the feverish excitability of a woman who laughs 
aloud or bursts into tears at the sudden happening 
even of the most trifling occurrence. This passionate 
style is extremely powerful, and half the reputation 
of Dickens results from it. Ordinary men have 
only feeble emotions. We labor mechanically: we 
yawn a good deal ; three-fourths of the things we 
see altogether fail to produce an impression on us. 
"We doze in a set of habits, and at last cease to take 
any notice of the household scenes, the petty details, 
the ordinary experiences which constitute the main 
mass of our lives. All of a sudden there comes a 
man who makes those very things interesting; he 
even constructs dramas out of them ; turns them 
into objects of admiration, of tenderness, of terror. 
Without leaving our fireside, without getting out of 
the omnibus, we find ourselves trembling, or our 
eyes full of tears, or seized with a fit of inextinguish- 
able laughter. We are transformed ; our life is 
doubled; our souls are set a-growing ; we find that 
we feel, that we suffer, that we love. The excite- 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 233 

ment is increased again by the contrast, the swift 
succession, the number of the sentiments crowded 
upon us; we are hurried along for tw^o hundred 
pages upon a torrent of new emotions, crossing and 
conflicting; the flood infects us with its own vio- 
lence ; we are flung along with it into eddies and 
rapids, and at last are cast ashore, enchanted and 
exhausted. It is an intoxication, and the experience 
is too violent for a delicate mind. It suits the public, 
however, and their approbation has justified its use. 
This kind of sensibility j^roduces one or the other 
of two eflects : laughter or tears. There are other 
efl*ects, but they are to be produced only by an 
elevated eloquence. They belong to w^hat is called 
the sublime ; and w^e have seen that to Dickens 
this is an inaccessible region. But no author has 
known better how to touch and aflect the feelings. 
lie literally makes us weep ; until we have read 
him, we do not know how much pity there is in our 
hearts. The sorrow of a child wdio wants his father 
to love him, but whose father does not love him ; 
the hopeless love and slow death of a poor, half- 
witted young man ; all such pictures of secret 
griefs leave an indelible impression. The tears 
which they call out are genuine, — they come from 
compassion exclusively. Balzac, George Sand, 
Stendhal, have told stories of human misery — is it 
possible to be a romancer without telling them ? But 
they did not go to look for them; they simply met 
with them. They did not take pains to display 
them to us; they simply went their way, and as they 
went, they found these stories. It was love of art 



234 CHARLES DICKENS. 

rather than of humanity that actuated them. Their 
pleasure came from observing the play of the pas- 
sions, from combining successions of events, from 
describing powerful characters ; they write, not from 
sympathy with the wretched, but from love of the 
beautiful. When you lay down "Mauprat," your 
emotion is not sympathy only. You also feel a pro- 
found admiration for the greatness and generosity 
of love. When you have read " Le Pere Goriot," 
you are heart-broken with the torments it describes: 
but the astonishing power of invention it shows, its 
accumulation of facts, the abundance of its general 
ideas, its power of analysis, carry you into the world of 
science, and your painful sympathy is relieved by the 
interest of this exhibition of the physiology of the 
heart. But Dickens never relieves our sympathy. He 
makes choice of subjects that call it all out, and with 
unequalled intensity; the long-continued oppression of 
children tyrannized over and starved by their school- 
master; the life of the operative Stephen Blackpool, 
robbed and dishonored by his wife, ostracized by his 
comrades, himself charged with theft, languishing 
for six days at the bottom of a pit into which 
he has fallen, wounded, exhausted by fever, and just 
dying, when at last help reaches him. Rachel, his 
only friend, is present ; and her terror, her cries, the 
whirlwind of despair in which Dickens knows how 
to envelope his personages, form an introduction for 
the painful picture of that resigned death. The 
bucket that has been lowered has brought up a form 
crushed almost out of humanity. We see the face, 
pale, exhausted, patient, turned to the heavens, 



M. TAINES ANALYSIS. 235 

while the right hand, broken and hanging helpless, 
seems to seek for some other hand to hold it. The 
suiferer smiles, and feebly asks for " Rachel." She 
comes to him, and bending over him, her eyes come 
between his and the heaven, for he is unable to turn 
his head to look at her. Then, in broken speech, he 
tells her of his long agony. Indeed, ever since he was 
born, he has experienced only misery and injustice ; 
but such is the law; the feeble suffer; they are 
made for suffering. The pit into which he fell has 
been the death of hundreds of men — fathers, hus- 
bands, sons, the supports of hundreds of families. 
The miners have petitioned parliament for God's 
sake to prevent their occupation from being their 
death ; to save them for the sake of their wives and 
children, whom they love as much as gentlemen do 
theii's; but all in vain. While the pit was being 
worked, it killed men, and unnecessarily; when 
abandoned, it kills them still. Stephen tells all 
this without anger — calmly, simply, merely as nar- 
rating truths. His slanderer is present before him, 
but he feels no anger, accuses no one ; he only 
charges his father to contradict the slander as 
soon as he is dead. His heart is already above, 
in the sky, where he sees a star shining. In the 
midst of his torment, on his bed of stones down in 
the pit, he has been looking up at it ; and its tender, 
touching gaze, mystic and serene, has calmed the 
anguish of his mind and of his body.* 

* " * It ha' shined upon me,' he said reverently, 'in my pain 
and trouble down below. It ha' shined into my mind,' " etc. — 
Hard Times. 



236 y CHAELES DICKENS. 

.^ And it is tins same writer who is the most satirical, 
the most comic, the most of a buifoon, of all English 
writers ! A strange gayety ! Yet it is the only 
gayety that accords with his impassioned sensibility. 
There is a laughter which borders closely on tears. 
Satire is the sister of elegy. If one }3leads for the 
oppressed, the other attacks the oppressors. Vexed 
at evils and vices, Dickens avenges himself by ridi- 
cule — his purpose being, not to describe them, but 
to punish them. Nothing could be more overwhelm- 
ing than his long chapters of sustained irony, whose 
sarcasm thrusts his victim through and through, 
more and more mordant and piercing at every line. 
He has five or six such chapters directed against the 
Americans, aimed at their mercenary newspapers, 
their drunken newspaper men, their swindling spec- 
ulators, their female w^riters, their vulgarity, famil- 
iarity, insolence, brutality — chapters that might 
ravish an absolutist, and would justify the liberalist 
traveller who, on returning from New York and 
landing at Havre, embraced with tears of joy the 
first gendarme he met. The organization of business 
corporations, the interviews of a member of parlia- 
ment with his constituents, the member's instructions 
to his private secretary, the parade used in great 
banking houses, the laying of a corner-stone — all 
the ceremonials and falsities of English society — are 
painted with the force and bitterness of a Hogarth. 
There are passages whose sarcasm is so keen that it 
seems like a personal vengeance. There is such a 
one in the account of Jonas Chuzzlewit. The first 
word which that excellent young man learned to 



M. taine's analysis. 237 

spell was " gain." The first, again, after he got into 
words of two syllables, was "money." This judi- 
cious education had, as it happened, occasioned two 
inconveniences — one, that having been accustomed 
by his fiither to deceive others, he gradually got 
into the way of deceiving his father; the other, 
that having been trained to look at everything as a 
question of money, he had come to regard his father 
also as a sort of piece of property, whose most 
suitable place of deposit would be in that species of 
strong-box called a coffin, 

*' Is that my father a-snoring ?" asks Mr. Jonas ; 
and finding that it is, he proceeds : " Tread upon his 
foot, will you be so good ? The foot next you is the 
gouty one." 

His first appearance is in this little act of atten- 
tion ; and it is a specimen of all the rest. Dickens 
is in reality as melancholy as Hogarth ; but like him 
he excites to violent laughter, by the buflToonery of 
his conceits and extravagance of his caricature. 
He carries his personages on into actual absurdity, 
with an intrepidity wliich is very rare. His Peck- 
sniff indulges in moral speeches and sentimental 
actions as grotesque as they are extravagant. No 
such oratorical monstrosities were ever heard of. 
Sheridan had already represented an English hypo- 
crite, Joseph Surface ; but the character differs from 
Pecksniff as much as a portrait of the eighteenth 
century differs from one of the illustrations in 
Punch. Dickens has made his hypocrisy so defined, 
so monstrous, that the hypocrite no longer seems 
a man ; he is as fantastic as those figures whose nose 



238 CHARLES DICKENS. 

is larger tlian the rest of their body. This extrava- 
gance comes from excess of imagination ; the same 
faculty that Dickens makes use of everywhere. In 
rendering more plain what he describes, he strains 
the eyes of the beholder. Yet the reader finds 
amusement in this lawless vigor. The force of the 
execution makes him forget the improbability of the 
picture. He laughs heartily when Mr. Mould the 
undertaker enumerates the consolations which filial 
piety (well supplied with money) can obtain in his 
establishment. What grief would not be assuaged 
by four horses to each vehicle, velvet trappings, 
drivers in cloth cloaks and top boots, the plumage 
of the ostrich, dyed black, walking attendants dress- 
ed in the first style of funeral fashion, and carrying 
batons tipped wnth brass ? " Oh ! do not let us say 
that gold is dross, when it can buy such things as 
these, Mrs. Gamp !" — " How much consolation may 
I — even I," cried Mr. Mould, " have diffused among 
my fellow-creatures by means of my four long-tailed 
prancers, never harnessed under ten pound ten !" 

Most usually, Dickens retains a grave manner in 
executing his caricatures. English wit says the 
most absurd things in a solemn manner. Thus the 
manner and the thoughts are contrasted ; and 
contrasts always make strong impressions. These 
are what Dickens loves to produce, and his readers 
to experience. 

When on occasion he is not occupied with castigat- 
ing his neighbor, but essays to amuse him, his sport- 
ive vein is not his most successful one. The basis 
of the English character is unhappiness (manque de 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 239 

bonheur). The ardent and tenacious imagination of 
Dickens seizes upon things with too strong a hold to 
glide lightlyand gayly over them. It impinges upon 
them ; penetrates into them ; goes through and 
through them ; searches about within them. And 
these forcible operations are efforts; these efforts are 
attended with pain. To treat things enjoyingly, 
one must be as frivolous as a Frenchman of the 
eighteenth century; or as sensual as an Italian of 
the sixteenth ; must either not trouble one's self 
about them, or must simply laugh at them. Dick- 
ens applies himself to them with solicitude ; and 
does not simply laugh at them. Take, for instance, 
such a petty comic incident as anybody may see in the 
street; a gust of wind that disarranges the apron of 
a ticket-porter. Scaramouche would simply make a 
good-humored grimace at it; Le Sage would give 
an amused smile ; both would pass on and think no 
more about it. But Dickens dwells on it for a whole 
half-page. He sees so accurately every effect of the 
wind, he throws his own personality so completely into 
it, he endows it with a will so living and passionate, 
he makes it whirl and fling about the poor fellow's 
clothes so furiously and so long, he developes the 
gust of wind into such a tempest and such a perse- 
cution, that we grow dizzy, and even while we 
laugh, we feel too much uneasiness and confusion to 
laugh heartily.* 

Perhaps this imagination, so powerful, so definite, 
so violent, so passionately fixed upon its object, so 

* " And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stormy- 
toed, tooth-cliattering place it was," etc. — The Chimes. 



i^40 CHARLES DICKENS. 

deeply moved by little things, so singularly drawn 
to the details and sentiments of every-day life, so in- 
cessantly fruitful of emotions, so powerful in arous- 
ing painful pity in sarcasm and in nervous gayety, 
might be pictured by imagining a single glance at a 
London street in a rainy winter evening. The flar- 
ing, dazzling gas-light, streaming through the shop- 
windows, shines upon the faces that pass, and its 
harsh brilliancy, gleaming upon their drawn faces, 
throws out with infinite detail and in unpleasant 
clearness wrinkles, deformities, and painful expres- 
sions. If amidst the hurrying and dirty crowd you 
distinguish the fresh face of a young girl, the artifi- 
cial light gives it an exaggerated and false coloring, 
and displays it upon the cold and wet and darkness, 
within a strange aureole. We are startled and aston- 
ished ; we put our hands up to our eyes to shut out 
the glitter of the light, whose strength we admire ; 
and we involuntarily contrast it with sunlight in the 
country, and the tranquil beauty of the day. 

11. THE PUBLIC. 

Establish the talent which we have thus described 
in such a country as England, and the literary opin- 
ions of the country will direct its growth and ac- 
count for its results. This literary public oj^inion is 
the private opinion of such a mind ; it is not endured, 
as an external constraint, but is perceived as if it 
were a part of itself It does not embarrass such a 
mind, but developes it, and stimulates it to repeat 
aloud what has thus been softly whispered to it. 

The counsels of this public oj^inion, which will 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 241 

have the more weight because they coincide with 
the natural tendency of our author, will be as fol- 
lows : 

" Be moral. All your romances must be such as 
young girls can read. We are practical here, and 
we will not allow our literature to corrupt our actual 
life. Our religion is eminently a religion of the 
family ; our literature must not paint passions which 
threaten the family state. We are Protestants ; and 
we still have something of the severe sentiments of 
our ancestors in respect to joy and passion. Among 
the passions, that of love is the worst. Be careful to 
avoid any likeness in your treatment of this to the 
most distinguished of your neighbors. Love is the 
central personage of all the romances of George 
Sand. Whether married or unmarried, she cares lit- 
tle ; she believes it beautiful, holy, and sublime in it- 
self, and she says so. Do not believe this ; or if you 
believe it, do not say it. It would have a bad in- 
fluence. Love, if treated in this way, sinks marriage 
to a subordinate position. It may produce a marri- 
age, or break one up, or proceed without one, as the 
case may be ; but in any case it puts it in an inferior 
place ; recognizes in it no sanctity but such as is de- 
rived from itself, and believes it impious without it- 
self A romance on this principle is an argument on 
behalf of the heart and the imagination ; in behalf of 
enthusiasm, of nature ; but it is frequently an argu- 
ment against society and against the laws ; and we 
will not permit any interference with society and the 
laws, either less or more. To treat a feeling as di- 
vine, to make all intuitions give way to it, to associ- 
11 



242 CHAELES DICKENS. 

ate it with all maimer of generous actions, to sing as 
with some heroic inspiration the combats which it 
goes through and the assaults which it sustains, to 
enrich it with all the resources of eloquence, to 
crown it with all the flowers of poetry, — this is to 
delineate the life that depends upon it as more beau- 
tiful and more elevated than other lives ; to place it 
far above all other passions and duties, in a region 
of sublimity, on a throne where it shines like a sun ; 
to make it a consolation and a hope, to attract all 
hearts to it. All this may be true of the artist life, 
but it is not true of the life of common men. Pos- 
sibly it may be in accordance with nature, but we 
make nature yield to the requirements of society. 
George Sand describes women who are passionate ; 
do you give us women who are respectable. She 
makes us wish to love ; do you make us wish to 
marry. 

" No doubt, these prescriptions may have their in- 
conveniences ; but art may be left to sufier, if the 
public interests gain by it. Though your characters 
should possess a lesser artistic value in proportion as 
they set better examples, you will be resigned to 
this result in consideration that you will succeed 
in being moral. Your lovers will be lifeless; for 
strength of passion is the only feature in lovers that 
is interesting, and you are not to paint passion. In 
* Nicholas Nickleby,' two respectable young men, 
who are like all other young men, marry two 
respectable young women, who are like all other 
young women. In * Martin Chuzzlewit,' two other 
respectable young men, just like the two first, marry 



M. TAINE's ANALYSIS. 243 

two Other respectable young women, just like tlie 
two first. In ' Dorabey and Son,' there is only one 
respectable young man, and one respectable young 
woman, but no other difference ; and so on. You 
have an astonishing number of marriages ; enough to 
people all England. And what is still more curious, 
they are all disinterested ; the young men and young 
women despise money with as much sincerity as on 
the boards of the Opera Comique. You will enlarge 
to any extent upon the pretty embarrassments of the 
betrothed pair, the tears of the mothers, the weeping 
of the whole company, the delightful and touching 
scenes of the dinner-table. You will compose a 
quantity of family groups, all as affecting and almost 
as agreeable as the paintings on fire-screens. The 
reader will be moved ; he will think himself a spec- 
tator of the innocent loves and virtuous attentions of 
a little boy and girl ten years old ; he will feel like 
saying to them. My good little friends, always be 
good. But you will be principally interesting to 
young girls, who will learn from you how a lover 
should make his court in a manner at once assiduous 
and entirely proper. If you venture upon a seduction, 
as in ' David Copperfield,' you will not display the 
progress, the ardor, the intoxications of the amour, 
but only the misery, the despair, the remorse. If, 
as in ' Copperfield' and ' The Cricket on the 
Hearth,' you describe a matrimonial trouble and a 
suspected wife, you will make haste to restore peace 
to the family and innocence to the lady, and will 
deliver by her mouth a eulogium on marriage mag- 
nificent enough to be a model to M. Emile Augier. If, 



244 CHARLES DICKENS. 

as in ' Hard Times,' a wife goes to the very verge of 
wrong-doing, she is to stop short at the verge. If, 
as in * Dombey and Son,' she elopes from the con- 
jugal abode, she is to remain pure, she is to be 
guilty of no crime, except in appearance, and she is 
to treat her lover in such a way that you would 
much prefer to be her husband. If, as in ' Copper- 
field,' you represent the troubles and follies of love, 
you are to be jocular over the love-affair that is 
thus handled; to be sure and show all its petti- 
nesses; in substance, to excuse yourself to your 
reader. You are never to allow utterance to the 
ardent, generous, undisciplined voice of an all- 
powerful passion ; it is to be managed as a play- 
thing for good children, or a desirable ornament for 
married people. In representing marriage, however, 
you can find something to compensate you. Your 
genius for observation and your taste for details may 
be exercised on the scenes of domestic life. You 
will excel in describing a fire-side picture, a family 
conversation, children on their mother's lap, a hus- 
band at work by lamp-light at the side of his sleep- 
ing wife, his heart full of happiness and courage, 
because he is laboring for his dear ones. Your women 
will be impressive or charming ; such as Dora, still 
a young girl, though she is married, whose little 
poutings, pretty ways, childish actions and laughter, 
enliven the household like the twitterings of a bird ; 
or Esther, whose perfect goodness and divine inno- 
cence are unsoiled either by trials or by time ; or 
Agnes, so calm, so patient, so sensible, so pure, so 
respectable, — a perfect model of a wife, and meriting 



M. TAINE's analysis. 245 

in her single self all the respect which is due to the 
married state. And when you shall attempt to set 
forth the attractions of conjugal duty, the nobility 
of conjugal friendship, the strength of a sentiment 
cultivated by ten years of confidence, helpfulness, 
and mutual devotion, your sensibilities, so long re- 
strained, shall inspire you with an eloquence as 
pathetic as the warmest expressions of passion.* 

" But the worst novels are not those which glorify 
love. To venture as far as our neighbors have ven- 
tured, we must live on the other side of the Channel. 
With us, there are some who admire Balzac, but 
nobody who would tolerate him. Some claim that he 
is not immoral ; but everybody knows that always 
and everywhere he leaves morality out of the ac- 
count. George Sand has celebrated but one passion : 
Balzac has celebrated them all. He has treated 
them as forces ; and believing that force is good, he 
has deduced them from their causes, placed their 
circumstances around them, developed their effects, 
carried them out to their extremes, enlarged them 
into a species of sublime monsters, more consistent 
and more true than the very truth itself. But here 
we do not admit that any man may reduce himself 
to an artist and nothing more. We do not choose 
him to separate himself from his conscience, to leave 
the practical results of his work out of the question. 
We will never allow that this very trait is the prin- 
cipal characteristic of our own Shakspeare ; we will 
not confess that, like Balzac, he carries his heroes 

* "David Copperfield," in the scene between Dr. Strong and 
his wife. 



246 CHAELES DICKENS. 

into crimes and into monomaniacs ; that like him he 
dwells in the region of pure logic and pure imagina- 
tion. We have greatly changed since the sixteenth 
century; at present, we condemn much which in 
former years we approved. We do not wish the 
reader to become interested in a miser, an ambitious 
person, a debauchee. He will, however, be interested 
in him, if the author, neither praising nor blaming, 
occupies himself in explaining the temperament and 
education of his subject, and the form of brain, the 
habits of mind, which have reinforced his natural 
tendency ; in showing how necessary were the 
results of such a character, in following it through 
all the phases of its experience, in painting the in- 
creased strength which years and indulgence give 
it, in showing the irresistible downfall which plunges 
a man into madness or death. The reader who is 
captivated by the logic of this method, admires the 
results of its operations, and forgets to be angry 
at the personage himself who is created. What a 
capital miser ! he exclaims, but does not trouble 
himself about the evil consequences of avarice. He 
becomes a philosopher and an artist, and forgets 
that he is a respectable citizen. Always remember, 
however, that you are one; and renounce all the 
beauties that require such a corrupt soil to flourish in. 
"Among these beauties, grandeur is the foremost. 
One must be interested in the passions in order to 
understand their whole extent, to reckon up all their 
springs, to describe their whole course. They are 
like diseases. If you confine yourself to speaking 
against them, you will never come to understand 



M. taine's analysis. 247 

them. If you do not deal with them as a physiolo- 
gist, if you do not actually feel a love for them, if 
you do not make them your heroes, if, for instance, 
you are not delighted to discover a fine trait of 
avarice, as a physician would be in discovering some 
precious symptom, you can never map out their 
whole vast system, nor display their fatal grandeur. 
You are not to endeavor after this immoral kind of 
merit, and moreover, it is not suited to the character 
of your mind. Your extreme sensibility, your ever 
ready irony, must find employment. You are not 
calm enough to penetrate to the very bottom of a 
character. You prefer either to be affected by 
it or to be jocular with it. You take sides with 
regard to it at any rate ; you make it either your 
enemy or your friend; you render it odious or 
touching. Still you do not paint a likeness of it; 
you are too passionate, and not enough inquisitive. 
On the other hand, the tenacious quality of your 
imagination, the force and concentration with which 
your thoughts penetrate into the details which you 
desire to apprehend, operate to limit your knowl- 
edge, confine you to some single trait, prevent you 
from exploring every part, from sounding all the 
depths of a soul. Your imagination is too vivid, 
but not large enough. What you can execute, then, 
is this : you can seize upon some one attitude of a 
character, can see nothing else in him, and can keep 
it unchanged from beginning to end of the work. His 
face will always have the same expression, and that 
expression will almost always be some grimace. Each 
of your personages will have some trick or other, 



248 CHARLES DICKENS. 

which will never be absent. Mercy Pecksniff will 
laugh at every word ; Mark Tapley, under all 
sorts of circumstances, will repeat his watchword of 
' Jolly ;' Mrs. Gamp will be incessantly talking of 
Mrs. Harris ; the apothecary, Mr. Chillip, will do 
nothing that will not be stamped with timidity ; 
Mr. Micawber will be uttering one and the same 
sort of emphasized phrases through three volumes, 
and five or six times he will pass with a ludicrous 
brusqueness from joy to grief. Each of your char- 
acters shall be the incarnation of some one vice or 
virtue or absurdity ; and whatever the quality 
that you give him, its display shall be so pre- 
quent, so invariable, so exclusive, that he shall seem 
not so much like a living man as an abstraction 
di-essed up in man's clothes. The French have a 
Tartufe who is a hypocrite, like your Mr. Pecksniff; 
but his hypocrisy has not destroyed the rest of his 
being. If his vice serves the purpose of the 
comedy, his nature as a whole entitles him to a 
place among human beings. Besides his single 
grimace he has a character, a temperament. He is 
big, strong, red, brutal, sensual. The vigor of his 
blood gives him audacity; his audacity gives him 
repose ; his audacity, his repose, his quickness of 
decision, his contempt for other men, make him a 
great politician. After he has engaged the attention 
of the public through five acts, there is still more 
than one question left to be examined by the psy- 
chologist and the physician. But your Pecksniff 
will offer nothing for either of them to consider. 
He will selwe only to instruct and amuse the public. 



M. TAINE'S analysis. 249 

He will be a living satire on hypocrisy — nothing 
more. If you add a liking for brandy, it will be a 
gratuitous addition, for nothing in the temperament 
which you will give him will require it. He is so 
buried in his tartuffery, in his smooth manner, his 
fine observations, his studied phrases, his mawkish 
morality, that the rest of his nature has disappeared. 
He is a mask, not a man. But tlie mask is so 
[grotesque and so forcibly painted that it will serve 
its purpose of public usefulness, and will diminish 
the number of hypocrites. That is what we require 
of it, and what you require ; and the whole series of 
your characters, in like manner, will have rather the 
effect of a book of satires than of a gallery of 
portraits. 

" In consequence of this same state of things, these 
satires, though they form a collection, will remain 
in reality separate, and will not constitute any really 
symmetrical whole. You began your career with 
sketches, and your romances are notliing but sketches 
fastened to each other one after another. The only 
way in which a natural and compact whole can be 
constructed is to give the history of one passion or 
one character at a time; to begin at its birth, to 
follow it as it grows, changes, and perishes, to seize 
and represent the interior necessity which governs 
its development. You follow no such development ; 
you maintain your personage always in the same 
attitude. He is miser or hypocrite or good, from 
beginning to end, and always exactly in the same 
way. He, therefore, has no history. You can only 
change the circumstances in which you place him, 
11* 



250 CHARLES DICKENS. 

but not himself. He is immovable, and no matter 
in how many different ways he is played upon, he 
always gives back the same note. The different 
events which you contrive are, accordingly, only an 
amusing phantasmagoria ; they have no necessary 
thread of connection, form no system ; they are 
piled in a heap. You only write lives, adventures, 
memoirs, sketches, collections of scenes ; you do not 
know how to compose an action. But while the 
literary taste of your nation, along with the natural 
tendency of your genius, subject you to limitations 
in respect of morality, prohibit you from represent- 
ing characters in a grand style, and forbid you from 
creating works possessed of completeness of struc- 
ture, still they offer for your powers of observation, 
your sensibility, and your satire, a series of original 
characters that could exist nowhere but in England 
— whose representations, executed by your hand, 
will constitute a unique gallery of portraits — and 
which, together with the record of your own genius^ 
will exhibit that of your country and your times." 

III. THE CHARACTERS, 

Omitting the grotesque characters, whose business 
is only to complete groups and to be laughed at, it 
will be found that all the characters of Dickens fall 
into two classes — those who have good sense and 
those who have not. He contrasts the minds which 
are formed by nature with those which are deformed 
by society. One of his later romances, " Hard 
Times," is a summary of all the rest. In it he ex- 



M. TAINE'S analysis. 251 

alts instinct above reason, the intuitions of the heart 
above practical knowledge. He attacks that edu- 
cation which is based on statistics, figures, and 
facts ; he heaps sorrows and ridicule on the practical 
people, the mercantile people ; he fights against the 
pride, the hardness, the selfishness of the merchant 
and the noble ; he curses the manufacturing towns, 
with their smoke and mud, that imprison the bodies 
of the operatives in an artificial atmosphere, and 
their souls in a factitious way of living. lie searches 
out poor workmen, jugglers, a foundling ; in them 
he concentrates good sense, generosity, delicacy, 
courage, sweetness of disposition, and with these 
good qualities he confounds the pretended knowl- 
edge, the pretended happiness, the pretended virtue 
of the rich and the powerful who despise them. He 
makes satires on social oppressors, and elegies on 
the oppressed ; and both his elegiac and his satirical 
genius find at hand, in their English surroundings, 
all the conditions required for their successful 
display. 

1. 

The first result of English society is hypocrisy. 
It ripens in the combined breath of religion and 
morality ; and we know what is the empire of those 
influences north of the Channel. In a country 
w^here it is a scandal to laugh on Sunday, where 
the gloom of Puritanism has retained something of 
its ancient opposition to happiness, where critical 
students of ancient history write dissertations on 
the virtues of Nebuchadnezzar, it is natural that a 



252 CHARLES DICKENS. 

moral exterior should be found useful. It is a sort 
of currency that is indispensable. Those who have 
not the genuine article get up a counterfeit ; and 
the more valuable the real thing is reckoned by 
public opinion, the more it is counterfeited. The 
vice is an English one. Mr. Pecksniff is not to be 
found in France. His talk would disgust us. If 
we have an affectation, it is of vice, not of virtue. 
If we would be popular, we must not parade our 
principles, but rather confess our weaknesses; if 
there are charlatans among us, they are those who 
make a boast of immorality. There was a time 
w^hen we had our hypocrites, but it was when religion 
was popular. Since Voltaire's day, Tartufe has 
been impossible. No one tries any longer to affect 
a piety which would deceive nobody and would lead 
to nothing. Hypocrisy comes, goes, and varies with 
manners, religion, and culture ; and, accordingh^, 
we find the hypocrisy of Pecksniff conforming to 
the characteristics of his countrymen. English re- 
ligion has little of the dogmatic, and is of a moral 
tendency throughout. Pecksniff, accordingly, does 
not utter theological phrases like Tartufe, but pours 
out philanthropic tirades. He has kept pace with 
the age ; has become a humanitarian philosopher ; 
has named his daughters Mercy and Charity. He is 
tender and kind, and liable to be overpowered by 
effusions of domestic affection. When visitors come, 
he innocently allows charming pictures of family 
life to be visible; he fhows off a fatherly heart, the 
sentiments of a good husband, the kindness of a 
good master. As it is the domestic virtues which 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 253 

are particularly honored at present, he selects tliem 
for his deceitful garment. Orgon, under the instruc- 
tions of Tartufe, says he would, under certain con- 
ditions, calmly behold the destruction of parents, 
wife, and children. The modern form of virtue, the 
English form of piety, feel otherwise. The remem- 
brance of another world must not influence us to 
despise this one, but to improve it. Tartufe, accord- 
ingly, talks about his hair shirt and his scourge ; 
Pecksniff of his comfortable little parlor, the charms 
of domestic happiness, the beauties of nature. He 
seeks to preserve good-will among men ; he might 
be a member of the Peace Society ; he makes 
the most touching observations about the benefits 
and beauties of harmony. Nobody can listen to 
him without being affected. In our day, people are 
refined ; they have read a good deal of elegiac poetry; 
their sensibilities are all alive ; they cannot now 
be imposed upon by the coarse impudence of a 
Tartufe. So Mr. Pecksniff's manner is that of a 
sublime long-suffering ; smiles of ineffable com- 
passion ; impulses ; irresistible movements ; graces 
and tenderness which are to reduce the hardest 
hearts, to charm the most delicate. The English, in 
their parliamentary assemblies, in their, meetings, 
associations, and public ceremonials, have acquired 
the habitude of oratorical delivery, the use of ab- 
stract terms, a style of political economy, a news- 
paper style, and a prospectus style. That of Mr. 
Pecksniff is the prospectus style; with its obscurity, 
its verbosity, and its pompousness. He seems to 
float above this lower world, in a legion of pure 



254 . CHARLES DICKENS. 

ideas, in the very bosom of ideal truth. He is like 
an apostle who has been trained in the Times office. 
He utters general ideas on all occasions. He deduces 
a moral lesson from the beefsteak that he has been 
eating. That beefsteak has passed away ; the things 
of this world must pass away. Let us remember 
how frail we are, and think of the account which we 
must one day render. 

As he refolds his napkin, he rises to reflections of 
much grandeur.* We discover in all this a new 
species of hypocrisy. Vices change from one age to 
another, as virtues do. 

A practical tendency, as well as a moral one, char- 
acterizes the English. By experience in commerce, 
in manufactures, in self-government, that nature has 
contracted a taste and a talent for business ; and it 
is from this that they have derived their habit of 
looking upon us as children, and as foolish. But 
this disposition, if pushed to excess, becomes the 
destruction of imagination and sensibility. The man 
becomes a speculating machine, full of nothing but 
figures and facts ; he disbelieves in intellect and in 
heart ; the world contains nothing but profit and 
loss ; he grows harsh, bitter, greedy, avaricious ; he 
treats men like so many parts of machinerj^ ; he 
turns into something that is only a merchant, or 
banker, or statistician, which has ceased to be a 
man. Dickens has produced many pictures of such 
business men ; Ralph Kickleby, Scrooge, Antony 

* " The process of digestion, as I have heen informed by ana- 
tomical friends, is one of the most wonderful works of nature," etc. 
— Martin Chuzzlewit. 



M. TAINE's analysis. 255 

Chuzzlewit, his son Jonas, Alderman Cute, Mr. 
Murdstone and his sister, Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Grad- 
grind. He has such characters in all his romances. 
Some of them are such by training, some by nature ; 
but they are all hateful, for, all alike, they aim to 
sneer at and to destroy goodness, sympathy, com- 
passion, disinterested affection, religious emotion, 
imaginative enthusiasm, all that is beautiful in hu- 
manity. They oppress children, they beat women, 
they starve the poor, they insult the miserable. The 
best of them are polished steel automata which go 
methodically through their legal duties without any 
consciousness that they are making others suffer. 
In our own country no such beings are to be found. 
Their rigidity is no part of our character. In Eng- 
land, they are the product of a school, which has 
its philosophy, its great men, its glory ; but which 
has never been established among us. Our writers 
have, it is true, often painted misers, business men, 
shopkeepers ; Balzac is full of them. But he makes 
their traits a result of imbecility, or else he draws 
such singular monstrosities as Grandet and Gob- 
seek. Those of Dickens, however, represent an act- 
ual class of men, an actual natural vice. Read the 
passage in " Hard Times," where Mr. Gradgrind 
explains his views to the schoolmaster,* and judge 
whether Mr. Gradgrind is not body and soul an 
Englishman. 

Another fault, pride, is the result of a habit of 
commanding, and of contending. It abounds in an 

* " Now, wliat I want is Eacts. Teacli these boys and girls 
nothing but Facts," etc.— Hard Times. 



256 CHARLES DICKENS. 

aristocratic country like England ; and no man has 
Fatirized the aristocracy more than Dickens. All 
his pictures of men of this class are sarcasms. There 
is James Harthouse, a dandy, disgusted with every- 
thing, and with himself most of all, and quite right 
too; Lord Frederick Verisopht, a poor silly dupe, 
brutalized with drink, whose chief trait is staring 
fixedly at people while he sucks the head of his 
cane ; Cousin Feenix, a sort of machine that utters 
parliamentary phrases, but whose works are out of 
order, and who finds it almost impossible to complete 
any of the ridiculous sentences that he is all the 
time beginning ; Mrs. Skewton, a hideous, broken- 
dow^n old woman, coquettish even to her death-bed, 
who asks for rose-colored curtains in her last agony, 
and who parades her daughter through all the drawing- 
rooms of EnHand to sell her to some rich husband ; 
Sir John Chester, a respectable scoundrel, who for 
fear of compromising himself refuses to save the life 
of his own natural son, doing so with infinite grace, 
as he finishes his cup of chocolate. But the com- 
pletest and most English of all these portraits of 
aristocracy is that of Mr. Dombey, tlie London 
merchant. 

In France, we do not go into country-houses for 
aristocratic types, but there are such in England, 
and as pronounced as in the proudest of our chateaux. 
Mr. Dombey, like a nobleman, loves his House as 
himself If he despises his daughter and desires a 
son, it is in order to perpetuate the ancient name of 
his House. He has commercial ancestors, he desires 
commercial descendants. He has traditions to sustain ; 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 257 

a power to perpetuate. For greatness of wealth, 
and largeness of object, he is a prince ; and as he 
is princely in place, so he is in sentiment. Such a 
character could not be produced except in a country 
whose commerce embraces the world, whose business 
men are potentates, where a company of merchants, 
in the prosecution of their business, has governed 
continents, sustained wars, destroyed kingdoms, and 
established an empire of a hundred million souls. 
The pride of a man of this class is not petty, but 
terrible. It is so calm and so lofty that for another 
like it we must look into the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. 
Mr. Dombey has always commanded ; it has never 
entered into his mind that he could submit to any 
one, or in anything. He receives flattery as a tribute 
to which he has a right; and other men are to him 
only beings at an immense distance below him, and 
whose destiny is to implore him and to obey him. 
His second wife, the high-spirited Edith Skewton, 
resists him, despises him. The pride of the merchant 
clashes with the pride of the aristocratic young 
woman, and the restrained explosions of their stead- 
ily increasing enmity reveal an intensity of passion 
of which only souls born and trained as theirs have 
been, are capable. Edith, in order to avenge herself, 
elopes on the anniversary of her wedding, in such a 
manner as to give every indication that she is an 
adulteress. Here it is that Mr. Dombey's pride 
shows all its rigidity. He has driven his daughter 
out of his house, from a suspicion that she was his 
wife's accomplice; he forbids any measures or any 
"notice to be taken of either of them; he imposes 



258 CHAELES DICKENS. 

silence on his sister, on his friends ; he receives his 
guests with his us^ial manner, with his accustomed 
coldness. With despair in his heart, devoured by 
his consciousness of the insult and the defeat he has 
suifered, and by the idea of the laughter of the 
public, he remains as firm, as haughty, as calm, as 
ever. He is even more audacious than before in 
pushing the enterprise of his business ; and at last he 
ruins himself. He is about to commit suicide. 

Up to this point everything has been correct, the 
bronze statue was entire, unconquered. But the exi- 
gencies of moral public opinion now pervert the 
proceedings of the artist. The daughter comes in, 
just in time. She supplicates, he is prevailed with ; 
she coaxes him away; he becomes the best of 
fathers — and a fine romance is spoiled. 

2. 

If we look through the roll of personages once 
more, we shall find, contrasted with these artificial 
and evil characters which have been produced by the 
natural intuitions, a class of good ones, such as nature 
produces, and of these the children rank highest. 

There are none such in French literature. The 
Joash of Racine had to be introduced in a piece 
composed for the girls of the seminary of Saint- 
Cyr. And even then, the poor child is made to talk 
in the fashion of a king's son, in a lofty style learned 
by heart, as if he were reciting out of a catechism. 
Now-a-days, the only characters of this sort that we 
have are those described in juvenile books, as models 
for good children. Dickens has drawn his portraits' 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 259 

of children as if with a peculiar satisfaction. He has 
not been trying to edify the public, and he has 
charmed it. He has made them all remarkably sensi- 
tive ; they are very loving, and they require to be 
loved. To understand these feelings in the artist, and 
this selection of characters, we must observe the 
physical type which he gives them. Their color is 
so fresh, their complexion so delicate, their flesh so 
transparent, their blue eyes so pure, that they are 
like beautiful flowers. It is not surprising that their 
author loves them, that he invests them with so 
much sensibility and innocence, that he describes 
such frail and lovely rosebuds as crushed under the 
rough hands that seek to deal with them. We need, 
too, to observe the homes in which they have been 
brought up. When the merchant or the clerk 
leaves his business at five o'clock, he hurries back to 
the pretty cottage where his children have been 
playing all day on the grass. The fireside where the 
evening is passed is a sanctuary ; and their domestic 
endearments are the only poetry which they require. 
When a child is deprived of such afl^ection, of such 
happiness, as this, it is as if he were deprived of the 
air he breathes; and a whole volume is none too 
large for the description of his suflerings. Dickens 
has filled a dozen with such descriptions, culmina- 
ting in " David Copperfield." David was aflection- 
ately loved by his mother, and by a good maid- 
servant, Peggotty. With this last he plays in the 
garden, he watches her at her sewing, he reads her 
the natural history of crocodiles. He is afraid of the 
formidable fowls and sreese which run about the 



260 CHARLES DICKENS. 

yard. He is perfectly happy. His mother marries 
a second time, and everything is changed. The 
stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, and his sister Jane, are 
harsh, methodical, stony. Poor little David is in- 
cessantly hurt by their cruel words. He is afraid to 
speak or to stir, for fear of making trouble for his 
mother ; the cold looks of these new members of the 
family weigh him down as with a coat of lead. He 
withdraws into himself; studies mechanically the 
lessons set him ; and is so afraid that he shall not 
learn them, that he cannot, and is whipped, and 
shut up alone, on bread and water. He is frightened 
in the night; he grows even afraid of himself; he 
tries to convince himself if he is really naughty and 
wicked ; and he cries. This incessant fright, so help- 
less and hopeless, the picture of sensibility harshly 
used and of intelligence quenched, the long anxieties, 
the watches, the solitude, of the poor imprisoned 
boy, his passionate longing to embrace his mother or 
to cry in his nurse's arms — constitute a painful pic- 
ture. These childish sufferings are as profound as 
those of a grown man. It is the story of a delicate 
plant, flourishing in a warm air and under a genial 
sun, transplanted all at once amongst snow and ice, 
fading and withering. 

The common people, like the young, are depend- 
ent, uncultivated, the children of nature, liable to 
oppression. Of course, Dickens seeks to elevate 
them. This is no novelty in France. The romances 
of Eugene Sue afford more than one instance of it, 
and the theme is as old as Rousseau. But under the 
hands of the English author it has been treated with 



M. TAINE S ANALYSIS. 261 

singular power. His heroes are wonders of delicacy 
and devotion, all nobility and generosity. A moun- 
tebank gives up his daughter, his only delight, for 
fear that he shall in some way injure her. A young 
woman devotes herself to save the unworthy wife of 
a man whom she loves and who loves her ; he dies, 
and, out of pure self-sacrifice, she continues to take 
care of the degraded creature. A poor carter who 
believes his wife false to him, openly declares her 
innocence, and seeks no vengeance except to over- 
whelm her with tenderness and kindness. None, 
according to Dickens, feel as fully as those of this 
condition in life, the happiness of loving and being 
loved, the pure joy of domestic life. None have so 
much compassion for the poor deformed and infirm 
beings to whom they so frequently give birth, and 
w^ho seem born only to die. None have a more in- 
fallible or inflexible moral sense. I may even say 
that these heroes of Dickens's resemble rather too 
much the indignant father in a melodrama. When 
the elder Mr. Peggotty finds that his niece has been 
seduced, he sets out, staff in hand, and travels 
through France, Germany, and Italy, in order to 
find her and reform her. But above all, these per- 
sonao-es have one Eng^lish sentiment in which we are 
deficient. They are Christians. It is not the women 
only who, as with us, find comfort in thoughts of 
another world ; the men do the same. In that coun- 
try, where sects are so numerous, and where every 
one chooses his own, each has faith in the religious 
belief which he has selected ; and the nobility of this 
sentiment elevates still higher the place where their 



262 CHARLES DICKENS. 

rectitude of purpose and delicacy of feeling have 
already enthroned them. 

The romances of Dickens may really be expressed 
in one single phrase: Be good, and be loving; there 
is no real happiness but the feelings of the heart ; 
its sensibilities are the whole of man. Leave science 
to the learned, pride to the noble, luxury to the rich. 
Pity the miseries of the lowly. The least and most 
despised human being may alone be equal in worth 
thousands of the proud and powerful. Beware of 
chilling the delicate souls which you are liable to 
meet in every rank, under all manner of garments, 
of all ages. Believe that humanity, pity, forgive- 
ness, are the best qualities of man ; that friendship, 
confidence, tenderness, tears, are the sweetest expe- 
riences of life. To live, is nothing; to be power- 
ful, wise, illustrious, is little; to be useful even, is 
not enough. He only has lived, he only is a man, 
who has wept over the remembrance of a kindness 
done or received. 



We do not at all suppose that this contrast of the 
feeble with the strong, this appeal to nature as 
against society, are the caprice of an artist, or a 
mere accident. Trace as far as you will the history 
of the English mind, and you will find it founded in 
an impassioned sensibility, and expressing itself most 
naturally in an emotional manner and under lyric 
forms. Both trait and expression were derived from 
Germany, and characterize the literature of the time 
before the Conquest. They appear again, after an 



. M. TAINE'S analysis. 263 

interval, in the sixteenth century, after the predom- 
inance of the French literature imported from Nor- 
mandy had passed by. They are the very soul of 
the nation. But the education of this soul has been 
opposed to its natural genius. Its history has con- 
tradicted its nature; its original tendency has strug- 
gled against all the great events which it has brought 
to pass or has undergone. The accidents of. a victo- 
rious invasion and of an aristocracy imposed from 
without, while they laid the foundations of political 
liberty, impressed upon the nation a character of 
pride and combativeness. The accident of an insular 
position, the necessity of commerce, an abundance 
of the raw materials for industry, have developed 
their practical faculties and their materialist tenden- 
cies. These habits, these faculties, this mental char- 
acter, together with the accident of an ancient hos 
tility against Rome, and ancient resentment against 
an oppressive Church, have developed a proud and 
intellectual religion, which has substituted independ- 
ence for submission, practical morality for poetical 
theology, and discussion for faith. Their politics, 
their business, and their religion, like three powerful 
mechanisms operating together, have formed, above 
the primitive individual,, another, of a different kind. 
A stiff dignity, self-control, the sentiment of com- 
mand, rigidity in commanding ; a strict morality, 
without compromise or pity, a taste for figures and 
for dry reasoning, a dislike for all facts not palpa- 
ble and for all ideas not useful, ignorance of the in- 
visible world, contempt for weakness and tenderness 
—such are the characteristics which the course of 



264 CHAELES DICKENS. , 

events and the influence of their institutions has 
tended to impress upon the English mind. But their 
poetry and their domestic life prove tliat this work 
has been only half done. The ancient sensibilities, 
though oppressed and distorted, are still alive and 
still active. There is a poet under the Puritan, 
under the merchant, under the statesman. The so- 
cial man has not extinguished the natural man. That 
icy exterior, that unsocial arrogance, that stiff man- 
ner, often hide a kind and tender heart. The Eng- 
lish mask hides German features; and when a writer 
of talent — who often rises into a writer of genius — 
reaches the sensibilities that lie chilled or buried 
under the national education and institutions, he 
moves the Englishman to the very depths of his be- 
ing ; he becomes the master of all hearts. 



^ %mt oi tbt ^uUitatiom 



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HURD AND HOUGHTON'S 

EDITIONS OF DICKENS'S WORKS. 



REDUCTION IN PRICES. 

Klverfide Edition to $2 per volume. 
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The publication of " Master Humphrey's Clock," and a Complete In- 
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MASTEE HUMPHEEY'S OLOOZ 

Consists of the chapters originally connected with the " Old Curiosity 
Shop " and " Barnaby Rudge," and is now reprinted for the first time 
in America (with one exception), nor can it be obtained in any of the 
current English editions. In these chapters Mr. Pickwick reappears, 
as do also Mr. Weller, his son, the immortal Sam, and a third Weller, 
son of Sam, an epitome of his grandfather. In this volume also 
appears a 

General Index of Characters and their Appearances, 
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HURD AND HOUGHTON'S 

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Price reduced from $1.25 to $1 per volume. 

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Any set or single volume sent on receipt of advertised price by the 
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HUED AND HOUGHTON, Publishers, 

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G. P. PUTNAM (Si SONS, Fourth Ave. and Twenty-third St. 



lO Publications of 

WASHINGTON IRVIXG'S WORKS. 

FOUR EDITIONS, VIZ. : 

RVING'S WORKS. The Works of Washington 
Irving, including the Life of Irving, by his 
Nephew, Pierre M. Irving. 

I. SUNNYSIDE EDITION. In twenty-eight vo- 
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white paper ; from new stereotype plates ; green crape cloth, 

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In sets, 23 vols., cloth, $40 ; half calf, $69. With " Life of 
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IRVING'S LIGHTER WORKS. Riverside Edition. 
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The "Riverside Edition" of Irving's works comprises all the " Belles-Lettres 
Works," complete in eight volumes. 

Knickerbocker, I Crayon Miscellany, I Oliver Goldsmith, 

Tales of a Traveller, Eracebridge Hall, Sketch- Book. 

Wolfert's Roost, | Alhambra, | 

*** The publishers desire to call special attention to this edition, as presenting 
these classics in the most enjoyable form. 

The volume is just the convenient size to hold in the hand, and neatly bound in 
plain green muslin with gold top. Its typography is unexceptional— a beautiful let- 
ter, perfecdy impressed, and the printing done with care and elegance. — Hartford 
Press. 



G. P. Putnam & Son. ii 



SEPARATE VOLUMES. 

IRVING'S ALHAMBRA. A Residence in the celebrated 
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romantic legends connected theiewith. By Washington 
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The beautiful " Spanish Sketch-Book/' the "Alhambra."— JF^. H. Prescott. 

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IRVING'S BRACEBRIDGE. Bracebridge Hall; or, the 
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" It will supersedaall other works on the subject, and never be itself superseded.' 
—Lord yeffrey. 



Publications of 



Important Book of Reference. 
AYDN'S DICTIONARY OF DATES, relating to 
all Ages and Nations, for Universal Reference. The 
new (13th) English edition by Benjamin Vincent. 
To which is added an American Supplement, containing 
about 200 additional pages, including American Topics and 
a copious Biographical Index. By G. P. Putnam, A.M. 
In one very large volume of more than 1000 pages. Price, 
$9; half russia, $11. 



*** This is the most comprehensive and reliable book of reference in this depart- 
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pense with this volume. 

AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT TO HAYDN'S DIC- 
TIONARY OF DATES. Including a copious Biographi- 
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AWTHORNE. NOTES IN ENGLAND AND 
ITALY. By Mrs. Nath'l Hawthorne. i2mo, 
cloth, |2. 

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$24. 

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" His name is destined to be a household word with all who speak the English 
language." — London Quarterly Review, Oct, 1863. 

HOOD'S Poetical Works. 3 vols, crown 8vo, cloth, I7.50. 

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or since. — Christian Advocate. 

OWELLS, W. D. NO LOVE LOST ; A Romance 
of Travel. With illustrations. i6mo, gilt extra, $1.50. 

*** An elegant an d delightful little volume by the editor of the A tlantic Monthly 
It is just the thing for a tasteful gift to a lady friend. 

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W. Bacon, i vol. i2mo, cloth, $1.25. 

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■ John Bigelow.] i vol. i2mo, $1.50. 

N.B. — Both books are published under Father Hyacinthe's 

sanction, and he receives a copyright on the sales. 























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